Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Public willingness to comply with the police is desirable in democratic societies, and even more so in high-risk policing tasks such as protest policing. To allow freedom of speech while maintaining public order, officers require protesters to follow orders and cooperate. The process-based model of policing suggests that protesters' compliance will be mainly affected by their general perceptions of the police—primarily, trust in the police and perceptions of just policing procedures. In conjunction, police actions during a demonstration and the dynamics between officers and protesters can also affect protesters' willingness to comply. This study uses a series of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models to analyse survey responses of 470 protesters who participated in the 'Occupy' protests in Israel during 2012. Findings suggest that positive evaluations of trust in the police and policing procedures correlate with compliance; however, when protesters perceived police actions as negative, they were less willing to comply.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected the work of police agencies worldwide. Within a short period of time, the police were assigned new responsibilities and were required to change their priorities and focus on enforcing unusual emergency orders. These new tasks, as well as the emergency atmosphere and its socio-psychological implications, raise a series of questions about public expectations from and trust in the police during the pandemic period. In this article, we report the views of majority communities in Israel (non-Orthodox Jews), as expressed in a survey carried out in the midst of the pandemic. We find that this population supports police enforcement of the new orders and trusts them to do so with integrity, believes the police have been successful in this arena, and is willing to report violations of emergency regulations. Overall, responses indicate more favourable attitudes towards the police, echoing previous findings on policing emergencies.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has changed the reality of police agencies worldwide. Since January 2020, police were required to enforce a long, constantly changing, often controversial list of emergency regulations, while striving to keep themselves and the citizens they interact with safe. Following an early examination of the short-term effects of the pandemic on the attitudes of majority communities in Israel toward the police (Perry and Jonathan-Zamir, 2020), in this study, we examine if and how attitudes changed as the pandemic progressed. We returned to the same sample, and supplemented the initial survey carried out during the first peak of the pandemic in Israel (April 2020) with an additional wave during the third peak (December 2020). Our two-wave panel study reveals that following initial strong support for the police, public sentiments dropped. This trend was evidenced both in evaluations of pandemic-policing and in more general views of the police. Based on these findings, we conclude that in contrast to the short-term, a long-term transition into crisis-policing may bear significant costs in terms of citizens' support and willingness to comply with the police and the law, precisely at a time when voluntary compliance is most needed.

Abstract
It has recently been argued that ethical/moral considerations could be better integrated into the science of policing. The present study picks up the gauntlet and examines if a central normative theory of government authority—Social Contract Theory—can contribute to our understanding of police legitimacy. Building on five constraints on police authority derived from Social Contract Theory, the present study examines the relationship between citizen views of police compliance with the social contract while enforcing COVID-19 regulations, and of police legitimacy. A community survey carried out in Israel reveals that public evaluations of the appropriate balance between liberty, safety, and police authority, have a significant, independent correlation with legitimacy, surpassed only by views of procedural justice. These findings have implications for the theory, practice, and future study of police legitimacy, but more generally demonstrate the utility of theoretical–philosophical theories and concepts concerned with ethics for contemporary research questions in policing.