Moving Toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy

“

The contemporary crisis of legitimacy in legal institutions has created a salient need for scholarly and practical efforts to improve and protect the relationship between the police and the public they serve. Happily, there is a substantial body of previous research for these efforts to build upon but that body of scholarship suffers from a lack of clarity regarding the precise nature of the important constructs and the relationships among them. Standing on theory and data, this paper makes a cogent argument regarding several of the most important constructs and positions them within a wider framework of institutional legitimacy.

”