Consent of the Ruled: A Call for New Measurement of Police Legitimacy
Open AccessThe United States is facing a crisis of police legitimacy. Researchers and policymakers are informationally ill-equipped to face this crisis. This thesis argues for the implementation of a federal data collection instrument as one means to address the legitimacy crisis. Chapter two applies David Beetham’s scholarship on legitimacy to policing, arguing it is uniquely capable of integrating normative and empirical concerns. This chapter also surveys extant literature and establishes an empirical basis for the implications of legitimacy for governance and society, before detailing how data collection may improve the legitimacy of law enforcement. Chapter three argues that the federal government is the appropriate jurisdictional level to administer and implement this data instrument, specifically through the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). This chapter further identifies this approach as an incremental means to improve policing in the United States, with the argument that Charles Lindblom’s disjointed incrementalism is the appropriate normative strategy for these goals. Chapter four and appendix one address methodological concerns and provide rationales and detailed examples of questions for the proposed instrument to measure public consent to policing. Consent is identified as an institutionally underappreciated component of legitimacy which may potentially be simultaneously measured and strengthened through implementing the proposed federal survey of public beliefs and perceptions regarding the legitimacy of law enforcement.
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Parkhurst_gwu_0075M_15706.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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