The ripple effect the perception of racial profiling, procedural justice, and citizen confidence in government

Racial profiling is typically treated in the academic literature as just one more null hypothesis to be tested. An area that has potentially greater impact, and that has been relatively neglected in the literature, is the perception among citizens that their local law enforcement agency engages in racial profiling. The current study examines the relationship between the perception of racial profiling, police legitimacy, and citizen's confidence in their municipal, county, and state governments. The level of impact of citizen's perceptions of police misconduct has on institutional legitimacy is of import to police administrators and policy makers alike. This dissertation is comprised of two major sections that look at different aspects of institutional legitimacy. The first examines the impact that the perception of racial profiling and attributions of procedural fairness and justice has upon citizen's satisfaction with their local police agencies and among individual police officers. Multivariate analysis revealed that the perception of racial profiling and broad attributions of procedural justice had a significant impact upon citizen satisfaction with law enforcement at both the agency and individual levels of analysis. The next section examines citizen confidence in their municipal, county, and state government institutions. The most significant finding was clear evidence of a ripple effect where citizen attributions of confidence in one institution influenced confidence in the system as a whole. In particular, the perception of racial profiling and police legitimacy were highly influential in determining citizen confidence in their governmental institutions. This finding strongly suggests that problems (even the perception of one) such as racial profiling are not merely "police" problems but governmental ones. Public agencies do not operate in a vacuum and criminal justice agencies are no exception. The findings reported here give strong support to community and partnership-based approaches to crime control such as community oriented or problem oriented policing