Predictors and Impacts of Police Legitimacy in the City of São Paulo

Legitimacy of public safety and justice institutions, especially related to policing, has become an important question of analysis in recent years. With different formulations of legitimacy and trust in institutions, many authors have shown important empirical connections between institutional and political legitimacy, obedience to the law, procedural justice and cooperation with the police, among others, in different international contexts (Tyler and Jackson, 2013; Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Tyler, 1990). However, there are several questions in which there is no consensus and some limitations in the international literature, such as a more consistent operationalization of the concept of legitimacy and the development of more cross-cultural comparison of these dimensions (Eisner and Nivette, 2013).

This article seeks to develop, through a survey applied in the city of Sao Paulo in 2015, an analysis focused in finding out the predictors of police legitimacy and the impacts it has over some specific analytical dimensions related to the policing activities. This analysis is realized through an operationalization of the concept of police legitimacy based on some specific attributes related to the claim to rightful authority of the institution and that power is rightfully exercised: moral and legal alignment, obligation to obey the authority and the law and trust in the police. In order to analyze the predictors of police legitimacy an analytic model is developed, considering variables such as feeling of insecurity, individual morality, victimization, urban disorder and procedural justice. This model also considers some impacts of police legitimacy, especially over cooperation with the police, which is a key factor for the proper functioning of the institution. Results and implications of the study are discussed.