Okay. Then I was just wondering, would you like to take questions straight after?
Would you want to do it after three pasta dishes and maybe and type two?
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thanks very much. So thanks for inviting us again, everyone.
It's been a great trip and I talk about experiments in public confidence and ethics that justice this has just been explained.
This is actually a very shortened version of the paper circulated because having written
that paper I realised it would be impossible to present findings from that in 20 minutes.
So this is something that just touched on some aspects of my paper.
If you're interested in this stuff, do have a look at the paper because there's quite a lot more in there.
I'm going to have time to talk about it in the next 20 minutes. In the time I have got to do these things, but it is full of things.
First, give two bits of background.
Contextualise this research in its wider setting, at least a bit in British, Anglo, American, Anglo centric criminology, I think more widely as well.
I'll talk a bit about public confidence in police legitimacy.
Just define some terms to say just define the things I'm talking about and why they're important and why they're interesting.
I'm taking I'm going to introduce a pursuit of justice model and think through the implications for that and the research that I'm presenting.
And then I'm going to look at the causes of trust and legitimacy and say, this is where the experiments aspect of it comes in.
And that's results from two experiments that might Janet are going to talk about.
One is the first one was covered in the paper. If you've had a chance to look at that and I'll finish with some questions.
So this is research and the wider body of research that this this this this particular
presentation addresses is actually interesting in the context of this this conference,
this seminar, because it's mainly about what to say to justice goes right when justice goes right,
or at least what happens what the police and other justice actors can do to make things right.
And actually, it's also an example of when experiments in social research can help.
And hopefully by the end of the presentation, you'll see why they went wrong.
The first bit of background is this the context of this research, in the context of the wider body of research,
which this is about one small part is really in the broadest sense, democratic policing.
And this provides a normative framework. This is the kind of policing that we kind of wants in some sense.
So you could draw on any number of authors to give you an idea about what democratic policing might look like.
Respect, citizens rights, procedural fairness. I'm going to talk about that at some depth.
Minimum use of force, accountability, responsibility, citizen participation, etc., etc.
This is both the kind of policing that we want something everyone wants this.
This is also, I suspect, the kind of policing the research I'm talking about presupposes.
So we've got the police in the United Kingdom are very far from being perfect, but they do at least tick some of these boxes.
And it may be that the things I'm going to be talking about,
this presentation only really make sense when the police services at least take some of these boxes to some extent.
I'll just leave that hanging. That might be something we want to talk about towards the end.
The second bit by background is this, and this is where we're getting into the idea of what can the criminal justice system do to get things right.
So one of the key issues in criminology and we didn't touch too much on it actually in the last couple of days,
but one of the key issues in college is why do people break the law? So what are the factors that determine people's decisions to break the law?
That's the question we usually ask the question in there, in my mind, myself and my colleagues, that none of this is my own work.
I just my own work. This is all very much part of a cognitive project myself.
My colleagues would like to look at this question from a different angle. So we would say, Why do people obey the law?
Why do people make this? That's a positive choice to follow rules and regulations and the law itself.
And of course, there are lots of reasons why people might buy the law, fear of punishment so obvious,
but social motivations, perhaps they might feel guilty to other people if they break the law.
Most people obey most laws most of the time stressing the context,
which I tend to work because I think it's wrong to engage in behaviours that prohibits it in law.
But what the really interesting course of course in this area of research and I think in the in the in the seminar in the last couple of days
is what can justice institutions do to effect law related behaviour and in particular what can justice institutions do to promote law abiding?
This says to not stop people breaking the law, but to encourage people to obey the law.
So just reframing the question, in a sense, the biggest piece of body of work we have around this issue at the moment is
based on the thing called pursuit of justice or the perceived justice model.
It's got a number of names. And this is a model developed by a social psychologist called Tom Tyler in the United States,
starting from the 1980s and going right up to the present day.
And what the procedures this theory of the procedure justice model is, is really a theory, a way of understanding social behaviour in group settings.
So this model is based on the idea that human beings are always acting in group settings.
They're very often, however, acting in group settings where there are unequal power balances within that group system in that context.
So it's obviously particularly relevant in the context of criminal justice
because individuals engaging or acting or talking to whatever they're doing,
just as actors are doing, do so across quite a steep.
Power imbalance, the police officer or the judge or whoever it is, has a lot of power over the individual citizen in almost every case.
And what the pursuit of justice photo does is provide a way of understanding what types activity, police officers, for example.
And I'm going to limit today's conversation to police officers. It could apply to any other criminal justice act as well,
provides a way of understanding what types of police behaviour might promote or inhibit compliance and cooperation.
So what might encourage people to obey the law rather than prevent people from watching and pursuit of justice?
I think like all good ideas, it's got at its heart a really simple, basic observation, and that's in the context of others,
such as the ones I've been talking about, where we have unequal power relations in groups settings.
What people value in their interactions with power holders in those settings is just indecent treatment,
transparent, fair decision making, sense of respect,
a sense of equality within that relationship, at least within that moment, when people feel treated in this way by just as actors, by police officers.
And this promotes a sense of exactly justice that this person with whom I was acting is acting in a fair way.
It promotes a sense of trust in this actor and their institutional organisation.
They represent just pursuit of justice. Trust in turn, enhance legitimacy.
Enhance legitimacy, leads to decision acceptance, cooperation and compliance with the law.
This is the core claim of the pursuit of justice.
In second core claim running alongside this is these processes are more important than instrumental concerns.
So when people are thinking about the legitimacy of the police,
their thinking much more about the procedural fairness of police, whether they trust the police in this sense,
than they are about whether the police are effective in dealing with crime and in combating in capturing offenders and prosecuting offenders,
etc., etc. It's not to say they don't care about those things because they do.
They just care more about the fairness of interactions they have with officers
or interactions they imagined they might have with officers in the future.
What is the pursuit of justice worth? Why does it have this effect?
Well, I think remember, it's all based on group settings.
What procedural fairness does is when you're interacting with a police officer,
that police officer represents to you an important social group might characterise it as a nation state.
Obviously there's a lot of material in sociology. Police have says that's exactly what the police represent to most people.
When that officer treats you with fairness, with dignity and respect, you feel included.
You feel you belong, you feel you have status within the group the peace officer represents.
When you feel unfairly treated, you feel excluded, you feel pushed out and denigrated.
And when you feel inclusion, the group you're motivated to as authorities, you're motivated to follow its rules.
When you feel excluded from a group and you feel pushed out, they're not motivated.
They're just sponsors of forces. You're not motivated to abide by those rules.
Basically, if a group is excluding you, why should you off going along with what the rules that govern the behaviour of group?
And I think there's an important other aspect of Syria.
So another component and a part of its effects lies in the idea that police should be exemplars of good conduct.
So when a police officer acts in a way that you think they should not back in of was treating with dignity,
respect or treating other people around you with dignity and respect, you think,
well, he's fulfilling his side of the bargain or she I should feel fulfilled myself.
When a police officer doesn't act in those ways, you're going to think, well, they're not doing the right thing.
Why should I bother doing the right thing? So I think pursuit of justice has an effective component and it has an evaluative component.
And both these things feed into legitimacy judgements. People make feed into cooperation, compliance and so on.
And if this model is right, of course cooperation and compliance of the law can be secured,
most importantly by justice agents, by police officers, not by demonstrating instruments like most of us.
I don't reiterate that is important, but primarily by treating people with dignity and respect,
by making them feel included, making them feel like long in the group the police represent.
I talked a lot about legitimacy.
Just just a brief thought about what I mean by legitimacy and in this context is quite important only from a legal context.
I'm dealing with an empirical notion of legitimacy here.
So I'm not thinking about things that actually make the police legitimate in some objective sense.
I'm talking about the way that people react to social institutions and the extent to which
they legitimise those social institutions based on or not based on their own opinions,
experiences, orientations and so forth. If you see legitimacy in these terms,
you can find a number of ways you can say it's property and authority or
institution that leads people to feel is entitled to be deferred to and obeyed.
That's also important in criminal justice context that nevertheless, the argument here would be when someone grants the police legitimacy,
they feel I have a duty to abide by the instructions of police officers and then grant police such as mercy.
They don't feel any sort of sense of duty.
And when they're at such a sense of duty as absence, police have to rely on force to get what they want out of people.
You can get slightly more expansive.
You can say legitimacy is a right to enforce commands which cannot be countermanded as have a monopoly of such legitimate force to.
Hey, we're going back to favour the idea that the police are the monopolist of legitimate force within society,
and we in this work tend to use a slightly more and even more, if you like, expansive.
Notion of legitimacy is based on what physical scientists call. They be firm.
And he's, got to my mind, still the best definition of best understanding the legitimacy of the way we're thinking about justice in this context.
And he thinks legitimacy is always going to sit on the basis of common shared values.
This is actually a quietly radical idea when you think about it.
This means that the legitimacy of important state institutions such as APC is always, in a sense, up for grabs.
It's always in if, say, of change of state flux to have more or less a different context.
People make judgements about police. It goes into de-legitimize case based on their own experiences they're dismissing.
The place is not a given. It's always in flux and it goes beyond that history.
Dimensions must be fulfilled for power to be considered legitimate conformity to a set of rules to justify that a
city's rules in terms of shared beliefs and the express consent of those governed or often affected by the past,
just about conforming to the rules that govern the behaviour of the institution.
It's about judgement of whether those are the right rules and it's about the expressed consent of the people.
So it's not naive to believe that police are just basically just they have to acting as if they had to express and it just mixing up ideas as it were.
So this would be one way of kind of conceptualising some of what I've just said.
So on the left are the same assets. On the left hand side, we've got factors that feed into trust in police.
So I've spent a lot of time talking about personal contact and imagining personal contact experiences of policing to personal contact with officers,
vicarious contacts, the kind of conversations, ideas or stories about the police that circulate social groups.
You can put the major and they can be the have for people's cultural repertoire.
They just imagining that brings the police.
You can have a course experience of crime victimisation and social behaviour have social psychological factors, authoritarianism.
Some people are just motivated to grant legitimacy to authority figures.
They just like it in some sense system justification power to their decision.
This is basically just bringing home the idea.
There are lots of factors going on behind driving trust in police driving legitimacy that flows from that trust.
I'm not that that's what I'm claiming happens. I'm going to concentrate today on just one very specific aspects of this wider motive,
which is personal contact between individuals and police officers.
And look, we look to the extent to which we can say the personal contact in some sense causes trust and in some
sense causes legitimacy as a causal link with these ideas and motivations that people might have.
And as I've kind of intimated at the beginning, pursuit of justice is fair, is primarily it's been developed in Anglophone contexts,
the US, UK, Australia, etc. It's finding increasing purchase in the over developed world.
If you want to use that phrase, it's much less clear whether it works in non Anglophone contexts or in the Global South.
I'm going to leave that question hanging with returns by the end of the question I do want to
address is that most evidence on these issues and basically almost everything I've said so far,
the evidence for that primarily comes from cross-sectional sample surveys,
opinion poll research, basically, which is my way of saying that the evidence we have,
the kind of relationships I've been talking about of good is good,
but it's not that good because it's only based on based on these cross-sectional sample size.
I mean, that's a slight caricature. The research is slightly more rich than that.
But what I want to talk about today is field experiments or the conduct of a field experiment.
And that allows us to test whether the experience of procedural fairness at the hands of police officers
really does cause really is causally linked to people's trust judgements and their legitimacy judgements.
And then we would think cognitive cooperation complies etc. etc. because
cross-sectional data survey data can uncover association that can uncover causation.
I think coming to labour that point experiments of the type that we're talking about now do allow assignment of causal
effects and I won't go too much into the kind of sexualising experiments of it's fairly obvious what they are.
But one way of thinking about what an experiment is in this context is, is to look at the work of studies.
So they say or all experiments or social experiments.
Experiments actually in general have four elements that they share in common a variation in treatment.
A You do something to one person or one group of people who have experiments.
The subjects are you don't do it to another person or another group of people.
They have post-treatment measures of outcomes. You measure stuff. In the experiment, you have at least one unit in which the observation is made.
I think in our case, people and you have a mechanism for assessing what the outcome would have been had you had it not been for the treatment,
which is just a fancy way of saying you have a treatment group, have an experimental group that get the thing that you think has the causal effect on
the outcomes you're interested in and you have a control group don't get that thing.
You comparing between the two and that comparison between the two allows you to exacerbate the
causal effects somewhat insists that true experiments require randomisation of the treatment.
I'm actually experiment I'm going to explain to you now does have randomisation of treatment not all it's.
Experiments do need randomisation, actually. And the second experiment is in the paper.
It's a non-randomized experiment, what's known as quasars. But that's just inside.
So I tried to claim I think the contact, personal contact with police officers is probably one of the strongest influences
on people's trust judgements on the legitimacy that they brought to the police.
The best evidence we have for causal association here so far comes from something called the Queensland Community Engagement car or queue set.
This does provide experimental evidence that the quality of interaction between police
officers and individuals has a causal direct effect on perceptions of police fairness,
satisfaction of encounters, trust the police legitimacy.
But I do think that what we conducted in Queensland, as the name suggests in Australia in 2010,
I think they took wrote random roadside breath tests of which they did a huge amount in Australia, millions of these things each year.
The baseline encounter in these road tests between an officer and a citizen is very, very quick.
Basically they just pull the car in a match up to the window. They say blowing this, you are negative.
Off you go. Encounters lost less than 30 seconds on that basis for the Q set child all do.
They took some of the core principles of procedural justice, dignity, respect, clear communication, transparency, etc.,
etc. They operationalise those into a checklist that the officers had to deliver in this encounter increased in council length to 90 seconds,
and as a result, the people who received that treatment, received that inspection intervention, had high levels of trust in police fairness,
higher levels of satisfaction with the encounter, and they granted the police more legitimacy on that basis.
The experiment I want to talk about was designed as exactly as a replication of this.
So one of the key strands, I think the experimental method is you can replicate it across different contexts
and actually it's in the process of replication that you really be able to get.
Firm explores the causal effects that you're interested in. And this was conducted in Scotland and the Christmas, Christmas just past.
And we tried to do it myself and my colleague Sarah McLean from the University of Edinburgh.
We tried to do it in as close the way or way that matched what they'd done in Australia as closely as possible.
So this was during the first National Festive Road Safety campaign and that's what it says on the tin really.
It's all about drink driving safety at Christmas period and to try to encourage drivers to not drink,
drive safely, etc., etc., they don't do random stops, they claim.
I think they've got the duty random stops in effect. But this is slightly different context.
Drivers are stopped by the police with the aim of getting drunk driving and primarily
actually improving vehicle and driver safety so that somehow they've got broken tail lights.
They may or may not give them a ticket for the broken taillight. They'll have a chat with them.
They say You need to give her a light fix. If they think that's a good reason, they'll give them a breath test.
You get the idea. It's kind of it's kind of an instrumental intervention to strike fear into drivers,
but it's also kind of a process based intervention to try and develop links between the police and community,
try to demonstrate to the community that police care about their safety and the safety of other people on the roads,
etc., as around 20,000 stops in Scotland over this period.
And we did we utilised a matched pairs three post design.
So basically road traffic policing in Scotland is basically almost two units.
There are 20 of these units with group them. It's pairs based on similarity.
So for example Glasgow and Edinburgh compared because they're the two largest cities as similar.
All the other areas were pattern by similarity. So we had ten pairs.
We then literally flipped a coin to decide which one of the pair got the intervention, which one of the pair didn't.
Then we had a pre survey, so all the officers in made stops in the pre survey period handed out fishnet people.
We then had a change over period where we provided them with some briefing period materials.
Then the post period they did exactly the same. They implemented the intervention in the test areas and they handed out a questionnaire.
So pre and post measures of opinions.
We have intervention in the test areas and we have the control areas and again comparison of what changes between pre and post
in tested control areas will give us an idea of whether the intervention we designed really did increase trust and legitimacy.
We suffered.
We were experiencing difficulties in design, office and business as usual in Scotland was was different to business as usual in Australia.
Remember in Australia the encounters were very short, 30 seconds and in Scotland they were much longer, much more discursive.
The officers and basically the officers were already implementing a lot of justice in the encounters they were doing, as it were.
They were good at explaining to people why had been stopped.
They were good at managing those clients as a way to demonstrate some respect and dignity.
So we had a problem here of implementing an intervention that was significantly different to business as usual.
But we tried. So what we just did is again designed a checklist which had a number of key elements
the officers were asked to try and get across in the process every very who said,
please do all of these things at the moment. You probably do some of them.
Can you do all of them at the moment? And we also included a leaflet to try to.
Blind to people why this festive campaign was running, what the police were going to get out of it,
what the public should get out of it in terms of increased road safety, etcetera, etcetera.
And the key message was were around respect, equality, trustworthy motives.
I explained why people why they'd been stopped. Dignity, neutrality, all the core aspects of pursuit of justice theory.
And that's just a picture of, you know, you can't see that.
That's just a picture of the leaflet that we designed with Police Scotland to hand out to everyone in the test group.
Got one of these leaflets, leaflets, everyone the control group did not for basic hypotheses.
We wanted to test. We wanted to see whether the intervention or this procedure of justice intervention that we tried to sign,
increased perceptions of pursuit of justice, doing the stop itself, whether the increased satisfaction with the stop did it.
Were you satisfied with the way the officer treated you on this occasion,
whether increased trust and confidence in the police and whether increased police legitimacy?
So for our purposes. Just a quick slide on the kind of use of randomisation that the vaguely evangelical
bits of this I'm not particular I'm not particularly evangelical about experiments.
I think in some respects are deeply problematic, but they are very useful if you're into social research.
So we got a very low response rate in this place. So as you usually get with Postal Service, if you've got less than 8% of the service,
but it's still a sample size of about 8800 or something, which is plenty.
But because of the randomisation that doesn't matter because the treatment was randomised on the flip a coin,
the actual response rate is immaterial and since it's a non-representative sample,
we can't claim that this sample is even representative of the people who are out in Scotland's roads over this period.
That's not the point. It doesn't have to be a randomised representative sample again because the randomisation process this is
this is why one of the reasons why experiments are good as well as being able to cite causal effects.
But what we found is overall across treatment and control groups, driver perception, the police encounter was very, very positive.
So this basically confirms what we thought. Originally police in Scotland were already very good at doing this,
so at least meant for one thing and this is what we kind of suspected from beginning our intervention was
rather weak because it wasn't very different from what they were doing at the moment compared to trust,
Australia was in fact strong. It was quite different what in English.
But what we found was perceptions of procedural justice increased in the control group that didn't
get the intervention and they failed in the experimental group which did get intervention.
So it's not that we didn't have any effect. Of course we made things worse by the intervention.
This is well talking about research going wrong and no effects on trust satisfaction with the encounter.
Did you like the way the police officer treated you overall? Went up in the control group and went down in the experimental group.
Again, we made things worse rather than better, and the legitimacy was not effective.
It's not that I'm sure if we go back to our hypothesis, that's just legitimate.
So I'm okay with that. I'll go back to, I hope, the intervention damaged perceptions of trust, genuine cancer engagement, decreased satisfaction.
The stock had no effects on trust and confidence overall in the police had no effects on the legitimacy of police in some overall sense.
So why didn't it work? Well, we're still engaged in some and some research around why it didn't work, why we made things worse.
But I think we can make some educated guesses. One thing we think we did was bureaucratised the encounter.
So we made the officers so concerned with filling in well, not filling in, but meeting all the criteria that been given in that checklist.
They forgot to manage the encounter as human beings. We slightly turned them into robots, if you like.
I say these effects are small, but they are statistically significant.
We also suspect that we made the process longer. Again, they were so concerned with doing all the things we asked them to do.
The stops became longer. They became more intrusive.
On that basis, they may even have been perceived experience as procedurally unfair by the people concerned because they were longer.
So if you if you drag things out, you're kind of suggesting to people you don't really respect them of their time,
for example, and you're not worried that they might have somewhere to go.
Want to get this over to move as quickly as possible? It's also possible the effects of the leaflets were negative.
It may be something in the design of the leaflet.
It may be something about reminding people that some have been accused of being bad drivers and have been stopped.
That might have the effect. We don't know about that. To say we do some follow up study.
The follow up site is trauma cop will have I would say having effects at all is great.
So this is actually I was sceptical right through this process that we find any results from this experiment whatsoever.
I really didn't think we bad to have. In fact we did have a fact just because it wasn't the direction that we kind of wanted.
It doesn't negate the importance that we found in effect and actually working at what happened provide a lot of
information for in this case the Scottish Police and Scottish Government on what they might need to do in the future.
Just lastly, things to to to clear up on that.
Some things can go right or wrong as well as right.
When you do this kind of research, you really are kind of, if you like, putting your theories, putting ideas right on the line.
You. To be proved wrong, that kind of kind of absolute sense.
How do you deal with these perverse outcomes theoretically in policy terms?
So when I come back to this point in a minute, but one policy implication of this, if you interpret it in the wrong way,
would be the police don't really need to care about justice when they're already doing all this stuff.
Fine. They've got no issues with this whatsoever. Well, I can tell you in the context of policing and asking them that isn't true.
They do have quite significant concerns and problems around implementation of procedures and policing.
But you could use the results of this experiment that we don't need to worry about this stuff.
How do you deal with that? It's almost a presentation issue, a bit deeper.
Experiments don't really work in isolation. So we might conclude on the basis of the case that this is fantastic.
All we need to do is increase the length of encounters, get this office to tell people what they're doing and trust the legitimacy will increase.
All right. So that's actually no.
You need to be very careful about the kind of implementation, the kind of interventions you design and how you implement them.
Beyond that, I would say replication against recipient replication is a really powerful device.
It's never good enough to do this kind of research once or twice. You got to do it lots of times.
It's a bit of a body of knowledge, if you like. And of course, leading off from that kind of problems is experiments, not panacea.
So it's not kind of positive about this idea, I think is a really good way of doing research.
It's not going to provide you with all the answers to all your problems or real questions and can create as
many problems in as many questions as it so complex interventions that the part we often interested in,
in criminal justice, are very different, difficult to implement in the experimental context.
So even when the Scot said, it seemed very simple and I invented it as it seems very simple.
I think actually it was a quite a complex intervention and as much as we had the test, the checklist we've given to people and we have the leaflet.
So there's actually two interventions wrapped up in one.
If we'd have had a positive effect with a negative effect, we don't know whether it was the checklist we'd given to the officers or have that effect.
We don't know what would have happened if we take one away would be it's got a lot of effect we observe, but we got another effect.
Gratification in the future can help solve these types of problems.
And that that's two interventions. And you think about justice intervention or an intervention, of course,
they're going off to have very many different aspects can be very difficult to design experiments that can address those types of issues.
There's always a problem, and this is best summarised by Nancy Cartwright, and I can't remember surname Heidi,
that the problems of experiments and previous social research is that it works there.
But will it work? So we found it works in Queensland.
We found it didn't work in Scotland and it works there, but it's good.
Will it work here? It's also a problem of implementation. This experiment, this A.C.T. results suggest that this implementation is good.
How do we get, from the context of the experiment itself to the wider embedding of that post,
a change in the concepts of actually working within which you're working?
And a final thought, I mean, I think one and this is tapping into some of the bigger issues around this approach,
certainly within British criminology and American College at the moment,
I think there's an increasing preponderance on the experiments, measures, methods in some sections of criminology and broadly that's to be welcomed.
It is a methodological advance over the methods and approaches we've been using before.
And it's great because you can assign causal facts and causes of what we used to interest you.
It comes with a number of attendant risks, which I spend a lot of time talking about in the paper.
But just to summarise the one which I think is probably the most important for me,
I think this approach risks instruments for those in criminal justice research.
Basically you can claim that procedurally that you should claim procedurally fair procedural justice is a good in itself.
It doesn't matter if it purchases trust, if you like. It doesn't matter if it generates legitimacy.
Those are that's just the way that police officers should treat people.
And it just needs rely on the idea that somehow works to generate trust and legitimacy to save police this issue.
This is what you should be doing. The danger of experimental approaches are we can say, well, actually it doesn't have much effects.
If this is too complicated a social environment for us to expect,
any particular intervention or pursuit of justice will generate an effect in terms of trust and legitimacy.
We could then, on that basis just say, well, we don't need to worry about perceived justice,
or we can't worry about perceived justice because it seems it doesn't have an effect.
That's the danger. And another way of rephrasing that question and I'll finish here, I'm high customer satisfaction.
It's an inverted commas round. It is again a good in and of itself.
We don't need an experiment.
We didn't need an experiment to survey drives in Scotland and find that they were generally very happy with the examples they encountered,
that we could have an unbiased survey, we could have just done that by talking to.
So in that there was a way of saying that there are lots of research questions that we might be interested in that don't need.
The kind of approaches I've been talking about today and the findings of those research projects can be just as important,
if not more important than the kind of things I've been talking about now.
And I will finish and I think. Yes. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.