Do Police-Citizen Interactions Influence Citizen Attributions of Legitimacy?
Theories of distributive justive, procedural justice, structuralist analyses of legal institutions, and social interactionist theories of law, all agree that perceptions of legitimacy influence the extent to which citizens participate in social control and social regulation. Although these theories of legitimacy focus on couts or other judicial forums, most citizens have infrequent users of the cours or other formal legal services. Accordingly, these theories of legitimacy overlook the important influence of citizens’ contacts with legal actors including the police, other governmental and administrative agencies (e.g., publi welfare, houseing), and private regulation. In turn, these theories may fail to understand how perceptions of the law and its legitimacy are formed and maintained. REcent evidence suggests that police in particular are far more influential in shaping the views of criminal law than are the courts or other domains of the criminal legal or civil law systems. Problems
