Keywords

Introduction

One of the key concerns in policing in recent years has been the legitimacy of the police. Typically, scholarly discussions of the legitimacy of the police revolve around how legitimate the community sees the police, or the so-called audience legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). This strand follows from the work of Tyler (1990), which suggests that, when the public perceives an authority figure as legitimate, they are more likely to comply with law and cooperate with legal authorities. Weber (1978) also pointed out that there are multiple reasons why a person may comply with the commands from an authority beyond perceiving the authority as legitimate (e.g., self-interest, affinity for the authority).

However, this theoretical model may be incomplete, as it neglects to consider the claims of legitimacy that are made by those who are in power, the so-called self-legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). The concept of self-legitimacy may play a role in enhancing the police integrity theory’s ability to explain the officers’ decisions to adhere to the code of silence, although—to our knowledge—this link has yet to be directly tested.

Lapses in integrity can certainly serve to erode the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public; however, a lack of self-legitimacy could also lead to lapses in integrity. The argument is that the degree of self-legitimacy an officer has, “…can serve to either promote or inhibit normatively desirable modes of policing” (Bradford & Quinton, 2014, p. 1023). In other words, the degree of self-legitimacy that an officer has may be associated with more desirable outcomes, as demonstrated in the empirical literature (see Gau & Paoline, 2021).

In this chapter, we explore the nature of the relationship between the code of silence and the officers’ perceptions of their own power. In particular, we look at how officers’ self-legitimacy influences their perceptions of (un)willingness to report misconduct. To do so, we use a two-step analytic process to estimate the effect of self-legitimacy on the code of silence. The first step focuses on the bivariate relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy. The second step of the analyses deploys multivariate models to test the effect of self-legitimacy—in addition to the traditional police integrity variables—on police officers’ adherence to the code of silence.

Self-Legitimacy

Starting with the seminal work of Tyler (1990), criminologists have become increasingly interested in the concept of legitimacy. The initial formulation of the legitimacy model suggested that, when an authority figure is seen as legitimate by those over whom the power is exercised, they are more willing to voluntarily act in a manner that is consistent with what the authority figure would want (Tyler, 2003). In the realm of criminal justice, those who see the criminal justice system and its actors as legitimate are more willing voluntarily to obey the law and cooperate with officials. This is what is often called audience legitimacy.

Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) argue that, by only focusing on audience legitimacy, we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifically, Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) suggest that legitimacy is a dialogue between the power holder and those over whom power is exerted. In other words, prior to considering the response from the audience, we must first consider the claim made by the authorities. Importantly, not all claims to power are legitimate. Legitimacy requires that the authority makes a legitimate claim to power in the form of an order, which can also be accepted by the audience (i.e., the person not in power; Raz, 2009).

The argument is distilled to suggest that legitimacy is both dialogic and relational (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). In short, legitimacy is predicated on a claim to a legitimate power made by an authority figure and the response from those over whom authority is exercised. Two important implications follow from this observation. First, legitimacy is not a fixed property, but rather something that is continually being negotiated between the authority figure and the audience. Second, as legitimacy is being constantly re-negotiated between the police and the public, the state of affairs also depends on how the police engaged in the re-negotiations and how they are perceiving their own authority. Hence, we may be missing important theoretical explanations for the behavior of police officers by omitting the self-legitimacy espoused by police officers.

The concept of self-legitimacy becomes even more important when considering the consequences of a lack of legitimacy. For most citizens, the police are the most visible and recognizable manifestations of the government’s authority (Punch, 2000). As such, the police are the group that society—through the government—authorizes to use coercive means to bring people into behavioral compliance with societal expectations (Bittner, 1970). However, this is a proverbial double-edged sword. The less legitimate the public perceives the police to be, the more likely it becomes that the police will need to use coercive means to attain compliance (Muir, 1977). This increased use of coercion can then further erode the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public (Tyler, 1990). Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue that the need to use force is an indication that the authority has failed to make a legitimate claim in the eyes of the audience (Coicaud, 2002). In other words, officers who need to use force may already lack self-legitimacy, which further exacerbates the problem, thus creating a feedback loop.

The issue is further aggravated by the complex nature of the police role. The very nature of the police role makes it nearly impossible for the police to not use some sort of coercion to accomplish their social mandate (Bittner, 1970). Therefore, the simplistic nature of the feedback loop described above may be too reductionist. Instead, scholars argue that officers must learn to balance the complex moral mandate and the realities of their job (Muir, 1977). However, officers who are unable successfully to reconcile the competing demands may exhibit troubling behaviors (Tankebe, 2014; Tankebe & Meško, 2015).

The concept of self-legitimacy is further complicated by theoretical and operational ambiguity. Specifically, two theoretical arguments have been inconsistently tested in the criminological literature. The first argument that is grounded is the dialogic approach between the authority and the audience delineated by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012). In a nutshell, police self-legitimacy is formed as part of a dialogue with the public. The second version is based on the work of Barker (2001), which suggests that the feedback from the audience is irrelevant in the formation of an authority figures’ self-legitimacy. As Bradford and Quinton (2014, p. 1028) argue, “police may gain legitimacy from the idea that they are different and apart from others in society…police have a legal duty, and are right, to enforce the law without ‘fear or favor’ irrespective of public approval.” Essentially, the self-legitimacy of the police stems from the fact that officers feel they are entitled and empowered to take appropriate actions on behalf of the police. Some scholars argue that Barker’s (2001) version is inappropriate to apply to the police because of the direct interaction between the police and the public, which augments the importance of the concept of audience legitimacy (Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014).

Prior empirical work has conflated items that try to operationalize both theoretical approaches, which are based on two potentially conflicting theoretical arguments (Gau & Paoline, 2021). First, it is more difficult to determine what factors lead to self-legitimacy. These antecedents are largely important to ascertain which causal sequence of self-legitimacy is more appropriate. Second, the effects for the consequences of self-legitimacy are equally theoretically muddled. However, given the consistency in the research in this area (i.e., self-legitimacy exerts generally desirable effects), this may be less of a problem (see generally Gau and Paoline, 2021). Given the complexity of this issue and the focus of our book on another issue—the police code of silence—we make no attempt to refine the theoretical development of self-legitimacy. Instead, we focus our attention on how self-legitimacy may influence officers’ decision to adhere to the code of silence.

Effects of Self-Legitimacy on Police Attitudes and Behavior

Beyond the purely scholarly study of the theoretical nature of self-legitimacy, it is important to consider what the potential effects of self-legitimacy are on the attitudes and behaviors of police officers. Research suggests that a person’s identity (i.e., perception of self-legitimacy) will directly affect how they interpret and respond to situations (Archer, 2000). This observation led Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) to apply this approach to their study of police officers, arguing that an officer’s self-legitimacy may influence how they interpret, evaluate, and respond to various situations.

Given that the police are authorized to use coercive force against the public and that their application restricts citizens’ freedoms, research has disproportionately focused on the use of force decisions. Some of the earliest research in this area examined the relationship between the self-legitimacy and attitudes regarding the use of force among police officers in Ghana (Tankebe, 2014) and found no relationship between police officers’ self-legitimacy and their general attitudes toward the legitimate use of force. It is important to note that these represented officers’ global attitudes toward the use of force, which are notoriously problematic to measure because most participants impute information to respond to the question, which limits variability of responses (Roberts, 2003). Conversely, asking about specific attitudes typically results in better measurements (Cann et al., 1980; Hollin & Howells, 1987). Subsequent research looking at the relationship between self-legitimacy and the use of force addressed the methodological limitations of relying on global attitudes. Notably, Tankebe and Meško (2015) found that, in a sample of Slovenian police officers, self-legitimacy was associated with officers being less supportive of using force to resolve a hypothetical scenario instead of relying on a verbal warning. Taken together, these results suggest that police officers’ self-legitimacy may be related to the tactics they are likely to employ when interacting with citizens.

A subsequent line of research suggests that self-legitimacy may also play an important role in the way officers treat community members. In their analysis of data from a police agency in the United Kingdom, Bradford and Quinton (2014) found that officers with higher self-legitimacy were more likely to espouse support for constitutional policing and preserving the rights of community members. These results imply that police officers with higher levels of self-legitimacy are less supportive of various police tactics that violate citizens’ rights. Further, these data showed that self-legitimacy also reduced officers’ support for the use of force against community members. The effect of self-legitimacy persisted even when controlling for officers’ perceptions of organizational justice. The magnitude of the effect of self-legitimacy was the strongest for the support for procedurally just policing and preserving the rights of community members (Bradford & Quinton, 2014; see also Wolfe & Nix, 2017). A similar effect was found in research on Israeli police officers (Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014).

The study of self-legitimacy has also been expanded to examine how self-legitimacy may insulate the police from deleterious media coverage in the wake of controversial police encounters with the public. In fact, Wolfe and Nix (2016) examined the role that self-legitimacy may play in explaining police officers’ support for engaging in community partnerships after considering the so-called Ferguson effect (i.e., police officers’ withdrawal from their official duties and responsibilities—to the extent possible—in response to the additional public scrutiny caused by widely publicized police killings and other police actions). The results from this study show that self-legitimacy mediated the Ferguson effect on officers’ willingness to engage in community partnerships. This finding is particularly salient in light of simultaneous consideration of the Ferguson effect and self-legitimacy. The Ferguson effect represents an erosion—or at least strong questioning—of legitimacy of the police (i.e., audience legitimacy) caused by their publicized actions. The fact that self-legitimacy mediates this relationship is consistent with Barker’s (2001) argument about the formation of self-legitimacy.

Self-Legitimacy and the Code of Silence

Empirical evidence suggests the importance of self-legitimacy in predicting certain prosocial and antisocial behaviors of officers (e.g., Bradford & Quinton, 2014; Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014; Wolfe & Nix, 2017). At the same time, we found no empirical studies linking self-legitimacy and adherence to the code of silence. However, there are strong theoretical reasons to suppose that self-legitimacy may be associated with the (un)willingness to report colleagues’ misconduct. To make the link between these two constructs, one must understand police integrity theory and the theoretical mechanisms that are posited to explain self-legitimacy.

There are four dimensions of the police integrity theory (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). A more comprehensive description of the theory is presented in Chap. 1, so we outline an abbreviated version here. The first dimension focuses on organizational rules and the degree to which police officers understand and support the official rules (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). The second dimension of the police integrity theory focuses on various organizational control mechanisms and emphasizes the police agency’s internal disciplinary system (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). The third dimension is the cultural dimension, which explores the respondents’ (un)willingness to report misconduct and their assessments of peers’ willingness to do the same. The fourth dimension of the police integrity theory explores the influence of the larger social context on police integrity, the dimension that has been the least tested of the four (Kutnjak Ivković, 2015; Maskàly et al., 2019).

The way the four dimensions of police integrity theory connect to self-legitimacy comes from the dialogic approach that officers use to form self-legitimacy. Specifically, Wolfe and Nix (2017) suggest that interactions with three groups of people are particularly important for self-legitimacy: supervisors, colleagues, and the public. These groups could be connected to the four dimensions identified by the police integrity theory. Specifically, the interactions with supervisors are part of the organizational rules and organizational control mechanism dimensions. Interaction with peers is akin to the cultural element posited by the police integrity theory. Finally, the conversation with the public that is key to Bottoms and Tankebe’s (2012) model of self-legitimacy could be part and parcel of the larger social context in which the police operate—the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory.

There clearly is some conceptual overlap between the police integrity theory and self-legitimacy. One of the key arguments proffered by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) is that self-legitimacy is directly tied to the moral rectitude of the power vested in the authority. This suggests that, if officers lacking self-legitimacy may also have a compromised moral compass, this flaw may then affect their willingness to report their peers’ rule-violating behavior (i.e., traditional police misconduct). Conversely, those with more self-legitimacy may have a moral compass that is so attuned to the larger goals of policing that an officer may fail to report misconduct because it achieves a larger goal (i.e., noble cause corruption). However, scholars have argued that those with the greatest degree of self-legitimacy will not conflate the means and the ends in their decision-making processes (Archer, 2000). In other words, an officer who truly has self-legitimacy would still be willing to report a colleague who engaged in misconduct that was aimed at accomplishing some higher goal.

The police integrity theory and self-legitimacy are logically congruent. Agencies are trying to balance the competing concerns of deterring officers’ behavior with appropriately severe discipline without increasing officers’ feelings of organizational injustice (Fridell et al., 2021). Research finds that self-legitimacy mediates the effect of organizational (in)justice (i.e., how organizational rules are implemented). In other words, self-legitimacy can serve as a protective factor in police agencies with a weak organizational inclination toward police integrity. Yet, we are unaware of any study that has directly tested the relationship between self-legitimacy and the theory of police integrity.

This Chapter

Extant research indicates that self-legitimacy has the capacity to predict certain prosocial and antisocial behaviors of officers. Yet, although there are strong theoretical reasons to assume that self-legitimacy and the (un)willingness to report colleagues’ misconduct could be related, we found no empirical study linking self-legitimacy and the adherence to the code of silence. The purpose of this chapter is to fill the gap in the extant literature by determining whether self-legitimacy can enhance the ability of the police integrity theory to explain officers’ adherence to the code of silence (i.e., unwillingness to report). We expand the traditional police integrity literature by also considering the effect of self-legitimacy on the police officers’ adherence to the code of silence. Furthermore, we explore the relationship on a range of forms of police misconduct, from police corruption and the use of excessive force, to organizational and interpersonal deviance.

Methodology

Sample

In 2018/2019, we administered a survey to a sample of 148 police officers from a medium-sized municipal police agency from the United States. For full characteristics of the sample and the data collection procedures, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

Measures

The analyses in this chapter examine the effects of self-legitimacy on the respondents’ expressed (un)willingness to report misconduct. The measures of police integrity, which include the code of silence, came from the newest version of the police integrity questionnaire (Kutnjak Ivković et al., 2019) that includes 12 different scenarios that depict instances of police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance. After being presented with the scenarios, participants were asked to respond to the same seven questions for each of the scenarios. Participants indicated their own perceptions of seriousness, how serious their colleagues would perceive the described action to be, whether the action was a violation of organizational rules, what the expected discipline would be, what they think the appropriate level of discipline should be, their own willingness to report the misconduct, and their peers’ willingness to report the misconduct. For additional details, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

Dependent Variable

The dependent variable for the analyses in this chapter is the respondents’ own expression of adherence to the code of silence for misconduct depicted in each scenario. Initially, participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale, which ranged from 1 (“definitely would not report”) to 5 (“definitely would report”). The code of silence variable was created by coding the responses from the officers who expressed a general unwillingness to report the actions (i.e., 1 or 2 on the original scale) as a 1, and the responses from the officers who expressed a general willingness to report (i.e., 3–5 on the original scale) as a 0.

Organizational Independent Variables

We have also included several organizational variables previously identified by the police integrity theory research. These variables include the participants’ own perceptions of seriousness, whether the conduct violates organizational rules, assessments of the expected discipline imposed by the police agency, and estimates of most police officers’ willingness to report. For a more detailed description, see Chaps. 1 and 2.

Self-Legitimacy Independent Variables

The questionnaire that was administered to the officers contained several additional items, including two items that measured the concept of self-legitimacy. Because of the theoretical ambiguity of the construct described above, measurement of self-legitimacy has been inconsistent in the research (Gau & Paoline, 2021). To make the results more easily comparable to those of other studies, we used items from Wolfe and colleagues’ (2018) study.

The specific items and their descriptive statistics are presented in Table 5.1. For each of these items, respondents indicated their level of agreement using a traditional 5-point Likert scale. The items were subjected to principal axis factoring to look for evidence of internal validity. The results of the analysis show that both items load together on a single construct, both with high factor loading coefficients (λ = 0.80; Table 5.1). Additionally, measures of internal consistency showed that the items have an acceptable degree of reliability (α = 0.84). Based on the evidence, we then estimated factor scores for the self-legitimacy factor. This self-legitimacy variable was then used in subsequent analyses.

Table 5.1 Measurement properties of self-legitimacy items
Full size table

Analytic Strategy

As in prior chapters, the analyses proceed in two stages. In the first stage of the analyses, we examine the bivariate relationship between the willingness to adhere to the code of silence and self-legitimacy for each of the 12 scenarios. These analyses are a series of point-biserial correlations between willingness to adhere to the code of silence and the self-legitimacy scores. The second stage of the analyses focuses, for each of the 12 scenarios, on the multivariate relationship between the willingness to adhere to the code of silence and self-legitimacy. Again, we employed the cross-folded LASSO technique for making out of sample inferences using the same controls as in prior chapters. For additional information on this technique, please see Chap. 2.

Results

The Effects of Self-Legitimacy on the Code of Silence

We first analyzed the bivariate relationship between the willingness to report the misconduct and the latent measure of self-legitimacy. The results (Table 5.2) generally indicate that the relationship is negative and statistically significant. It is significant for all scenarios apart from the scenario of interpersonal deviance depicting an officer spreading false rumors about a coworker. The average size of the correlation coefficient for interpersonal deviance scenarios—like this one—is the strongest across the four types of misconduct. In fact, the average size of the correlation is the strongest for interpersonal deviance, followed by organizational deviance, then use of excessive force, while it is the weakest for corruption. In fact, the average correlation between self-legitimacy and the code of silence for the corruption scenarios is 24% less than for the interpersonal deviance scenarios.

Table 5.2 Bi-variate relationship between self-legitimacy and the code of silence
Full size table

There is a fair degree of heterogeneity in the effects for the scenarios within the four sub-types of misconduct (Table 5.2). A closer examination does not show a consistent pattern in the strength of these relationships. In other words, for example, we do not find systematic evidence that self-legitimacy exerts a stronger effect on the more serious scenarios within each subtype.

The Effects of Self-Legitimacy and Police Integrity on to the Code of Silence

The results are shown in Table 5.3. Overall, the traditional police integrity variables do not substantively change with the inclusion of the self-legitimacy items. There are some minor differences in the results (i.e., changes in the magnitude of coefficients) and a few changes in the substantive interpretation of the variables, most of which are attributed to the stabilized standard errors after the inclusion of the self-legitimacy measure. We comment briefly on the differences in the results presented in the unconditional models shown in Chap. 2.

Table 5.3 Self-legitimacy effects on the code of silence
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Police Corruption

The first set of models (Table 5.3) shows the multivariate results for the corruption scenarios. The results here indicate that self-legitimacy exerts an inconsistent effect on the willingness to adhere to the code of silence for the three corruption scenarios. In the scenario in which the officer accepts gifts from members of the community, the effect of self-legitimacy is negative (OR = 0.75, p < 0.05), which is consistent with the bivariate relationship estimated above. However, for the other two scenarios, increased self-legitimacy is associated with a greater likelihood of adhering to the code of silence (i.e., being unwilling to report misconduct). It is unclear what could account for these differences, both of which are contrary to their respective bivariate relationships. Finally, the effect of self-legitimacy on the adherence to the code of silence is the strongest—marginally—for the most serious corruption scenario (i.e., theft from a burglary scene).

The results from the more traditional police integrity measures largely remain unchanged with the inclusion of these new variables, with the estimates of other police officers’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence being the strongest predictor of the police officers’ own adherence to the code. We see that the effects for all the variables for the scenario of accepting free gifts are only marginally attenuated compared to the unconditional models presented in Chap. 2. The same is largely true for the scenario depicting supervisory corruption as well. The key change for this scenario is that the own perceptions of seriousness, not significant in the unconditional model, become significant after the inclusion of self-legitimacy, which stabilized the standard errors for this variable in the updated model. In this model, the more serious police officers evaluated the scenarios, the less likely they were to say that they would adhere to the code of silence.

The biggest differences are seen in regard to the other officers’ willingness to report the misconduct in the theft scenario and the supervisory errands scenario. There, the coefficients for the type of discipline expected are slightly attenuated (as in the other scenarios), but the substantive conclusion remains unchanged. However, after including self-legitimacy in the model, the effect of other officers’ adhering to the code of silence is augmented by 41.8% for theft from a crime scene and 29.3% for the supervisory corruption scenario. These increases suggest that the inclusion of the self-legitimacy item may be explaining common variation with the measure of the respondent’s peers’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence.

Use of Excessive Force

Next, we turn to the results for the scenarios depicting the excessive use of force scenarios (Table 5.3). Again, the self-legitimacy measure performs inconsistently, this time across the excessive force scenarios. There is a strong positive effect of self-legitimacy on adherence to the code of silence for the scenario depicting an officer shooting a suspect in the back (OR = 3.30, p < 0.05) and, to a lesser degree, for the scenario depicting verbal abuse of a citizen (OR = 1.24, p < 0.05). Both of these findings contravene the theoretical expectations of self-legitimacy. However, the effect is theoretically consistent for the scenario depicting a failure to report a beating (OR = 0.74, p < 0.001).

The results for the traditional police integrity variables largely remain unchanged—substantively and in magnitude—across the three scenarios, with the exception of others’ willingness to report. The magnitude of these coefficients here is larger for each of the three excessive force scenarios than it is in the unconditional models presented in Chap. 2. In fact, after including self-legitimacy, the effect of peers’ adherence to the code of silence is strengthened by 31.7% compared to the unconditional model. Similarly, the effect is augmented by 20.4% for the scenario of failing to stop a beating and 9.8% for the verbal abuse of a citizen. Again, this would suggest that the inclusion of self-legitimacy into these models largely adds unique explanatory power to the model, although there is a pattern developing in the self-legitimacy item for these excessive force scenarios—and those with corruption: officers’ perceptions of their peers’ willingness to report seems to be related to their level of self-legitimacy. Given that conversations—and relationships—with peers is theoretically one of the accomplishments officers need to have to establish self-legitimacy (Wolfe & Nix, 2017), this is not entirely surprising.

Organizational Deviance

Next, we turn to the multivariate results for the organizational deviance scenarios (Table 5.3). For these scenarios, self-legitimacy performs more consistently across scenarios. In fact, self-legitimacy exerts the same magnitude of effect for covering up a DUI crash of a fellow officer and for false overtime reporting (OR = 0.73, p < 0.001). However, there is no significant effect for the scenario depicting an officer calling in sick to work. Indeed, self-legitimacy exerts an effect for the two more serious scenarios, but not the least serious of the three.

The effects from the traditional police integrity variables remain substantively unchanged with the inclusion of self-legitimacy. Thus, while self-legitimacy may be associated with the willingness to report misconduct in some instances of organizational deviance, the effect here is unique to those exerted by the other police integrity variables. The unique nature of self-legitimacy in these organizational deviance scenarios is distinct from those of police integrity variables, suggesting that self-legitimacy may influence officers’ decision-making processes differently based on the type of misconduct that is encountered. The organization—or at least supervisors—has been identified as a key partner in the dialogue to develop self-legitimacy (Wolfe & Nix, 2017). The results here may suggest that officers’ dialogue with the organization in the formation of self-legitimacy is seen as different for instances of misconduct against the organization relative to those outside the organization—as is the case in most of the corruption and excessive force scenarios.

Interpersonal Deviance

Finally, we look at the effect of self-legitimacy on interpersonal deviance (Table 5.3). Self-legitimacy only exerts a significant negative effect on the scenario in which an officer rudely yells at his/her coworkers for a perceived slight (OR = 0.44, p < 0.001) and does not exert a significant effect on the other two interpersonal deviance scenarios. Unlike other types of scenarios which show a trend in the effect but are not statistically significant (largely because of the size of the standard errors), this is not the case with the other two interpersonal deviance scenarios. In fact, the effects here are substantively null.

Furthermore, we see that the results associated with the traditional police integrity measures again largely remain unchanged. For example, the effects for the police integrity variables are almost identical for the telling sexist jokes scenario and the scenario involving spreading false rumors about coworkers. There are a few differences for the scenario depicting the officer rudely yelling at his/her coworkers. The only exception to this trend is again seen in the effect of other officers’ adherence to the code of silence for the yelling at coworkers scenario, where the effect is augmented by 98.9% compared to the unconditional model presented in Chap. 2. This is the only scenario in which self-legitimacy exerts a significant effect. Therefore, it is not entirely surprising that this effect changes consistently with prior scenarios in which self-legitimacy exerts a significant effect. Again, this finding is suggesting that the conversations with peers may indeed be an important component in the formation of self-legitimacy—or vice versa.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have added a scale of self-legitimacy to the multivariate model of the code of silence. As it turns out, the addition of self-legitimacy measures left the traditional police integrity variables largely unchanged, except for magnifying the effect of others’ willingness to report.

The results from this set of analyses show a complicated relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy. For three scenarios, the relationship is positive and significant (i.e., self-legitimacy increases the adherence to the code of silence), in five scenarios it is negative and significant (i.e., self-legitimacy decreases the adherence to the code of silence), and in the remaining four there is a null effect (i.e., self-legitimacy is not related to the code of silence).

To further tease out the nature of this complex relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy, we looked at systematic patterns across the scenarios. There does not seem to be an apparent relationship between the type of misconduct depicted in the scenario (i.e., corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance) and the nature of the effect that self-legitimacy has on the code of silence (i.e., positive or negative). Similarly, self-legitimacy is not related in any systematic way to the seriousness of misconduct protected by the code.

We have also tried to assess whether the nature of the questions we asked about self-legitimacy was related to our results. Extant literature has developed two distinct theoretical causal frameworks for the development of self-legitimacy. The first theoretical framework involves the dialogic approach outlined by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), whereby self-legitimacy is a conversation that officers have with various constituencies in the development of their self-legitimacy. Following this approach, self-legitimacy is highly dependent upon the feedback from others, be they supervisors, peers, or community members. The second theoretical framework, proposed by Barker (2001), suggests that self-legitimacy is unilaterally determined by the officer’s feelings and sentiments and is not influenced by how the police officer is perceived by others. These two theoretical models have led to a bifurcation in the literature about how self-legitimacy should be measured and captured, with some research identifying different antecedents of each of these forms of self-legitimacy (Gau & Paoline, 2021).

The measure of self-legitimacy that we used in this study was comprised of only two items, one of which (i.e., “I understand how my work directly contributes to the success of my agency”) tapped the dimension specified by the dialogic approach specified by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), while the other (i.e., “I have confidence in the authority vested in me as a police officer”) is more consistent with Barker’s (2001) approach. The nature of the questions asked to measure self-legitimacy makes it difficult to disentangle the theoretical puzzle surrounding self-legitimacy in our study. In unreported sensitivity analyses, we examined the independent effect of each of these two variables measuring self-legitimacy on the code of silence. As it turns out, the results were substantively unchanged. In other words, while the magnitude of the effects was different across these two variables, the substantive conclusions (i.e., self-legitimacy increases or decreases adherence to the code of silence) were the same. This suggests that, while it remains important to resolve the theoretical ambiguity surrounding the development of self-legitimacy, resolving it would not make the interpretation of the results easier in this study.

The fact that the results from this study are somewhat inconsistent with the emerging body of literature may have also stem from organizational differences. Research consistently points to the fact that police agencies vary in terms of their culture (Cordner, 2017) and their level of integrity (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). These differences are often driven by different organizational emphases and policies, both of which could affect the operationalization of self-legitimacy. Specifically, officers in the agencies that put more emphasis on constitutional policing and police integrity could have different perceptions of what self-legitimacy is than the police officers from agencies focused on more aggressive and questionable tactics of crime control. On the one hand, for police officers from police agencies of high integrity, the concept of self-legitimacy could rely on the view that their role is to serve the community and engage in a dialogue with the community about how policing should be done. On the other hand, for police officers from the police agencies willing to engage in more aggressive and questionable tactics, the concept of self-legitimacy could incorporate the view that their role is very traditional, focused primarily on aggressive law enforcement.

While these are theoretical possibilities—including a full range of other views of self-legitimacy between these two extremes—there is nothing that we can specifically articulate about the agency from which these data were collected that may shine a light on this differentiation. However, the agency that participated in our study is not known as being particularly progressive or innovative (i.e., actively reinforcing the importance of constitutional policing) nor is it known for being particularly regressive in any domain (i.e., consistently failing to control police misconduct). Instead, this agency is more akin to a typical police agency in the United States.

The importance of this characterization comes into play when considering the other police agencies included in extant self-legitimacy research. Policing scholars have consistently identified a “big city bias” in the study of policing, suggesting that the largest police agencies in the United States are both routinely more progressive and more likely to be studied (Falcone et al., 2002). Furthermore, research suggests that many police departments refuse to participate in the research concerning topics considered to be particularly sensitive (Archbold & Maguire, 2002). Taken together, this may suggest that prior self-legitimacy research may have been conducted in large agencies that were more willing to participate in research and were more progressive than the mid-size agency that agreed to participate in our study. It is difficult to confirm our speculation because many police agencies that participate in research are anonymized—as is our agency—as a condition of their participation.

The implication is that, perhaps, the definition of self-legitimacy utilized by police officers from the agencies that agreed to participate in prior research could be quite different from the definition of self-legitimacy used by police officers in the agency that agreed to participate in our study. This would suggest that, while self-legitimacy may indeed be an important factor in the decision-making process and formation of officers’ attitudes, what it means to have self-legitimacy may be understood differently by police officers from different agencies. This is a key question for subsequent research that focuses on self-legitimacy, especially studies linking self-legitimacy and police integrity research.

In our next, at the same time final chapter, we continue our exploration of the factors that affect the police officers’ code of silence. We argue that, to detect the full effect of each factor, such exploration should incorporate these different types of factors simultaneously. After presenting the theoretical arguments for the connections between these factors, we present the results from the full models that seek to explain police officers’ decision to adhere to the code of silence using the traditional police integrity variables, perceptions of disciplinary fairness, organizational justice, and self-legitimacy.