Research project: The importance of internal procedural justice and trust for policing and police organizations: An interdisciplinary and comparative study

Project information
  • Period:
  • 1 October 2013 - 30 September 2016
  • Funding:
  • FWO Postdoc
Description research project

Scientific research regarding criminal organizations increasingly points to the prospect that the majority of organized criminal gangs active within Western European illegal markets primarily display an easy-going character, rather than working in an organized manner.  As a result, these gangs are obliged to operate locally, where they are provided with the support of legitimate surroundings which are necessary to continue their activities. Therefore, locally embedded criminal networks have a need for infrastructure, legal and financial services, and investment possibilities in order to keep their trade functioning and to be able to launder their criminally obtained profits.  In this manner, organized crime comes into contact with the legal world.  As a result, risks emerge. Opportunities, however, are also offered:  Each interface between the criminal organizations and the surroundings which facilitate them, offers within these surroundings an opportunity to fight against the organizations.  In this research, attention is given to the governing board as a primary agency which potentially comes into contact with organized crime.  In this manner, the agency can play a significant role in resolving the problem.  Foreign examples already exist to illustrate the added value of adequate administrative action of local authorities against organized crime.  In Belgium, however, the administrative approach against organized crime is still in its early stages.  With this research, the possibilities for the approaches of the public administration to fight against organized crime are analyzed, and it is investigated to what extent these possibilities can be exploited by public administration in Belgium. The final objective is to create a framework wherein the role of Belgian public administration in the fight against organized crime takes shape.Trust relationships are assumed to improve the working of government institutions. Therefore, their origins and consequences have attracted a lot of scholarly attention. However, this attention is unbalanced: much research has been done on citizens’ trust, hardly any on public officials’ trust. This general pattern strikingly recurs in the literature on the police.  

To help filling in this gap, we scrutinize police officers’ trust. What are the origins of officers’ trust and how does it shape their functioning? The aim is to help explain and understand officers-supervisors and officers-citizens relationships. We will build on streams in the criminological literature, the psychological-criminological procedural justice literature, and the sociological-politological social capital literature to develop a theoretical framework on the origins and consequences of police officers’ trust in supervisors and citizens.
    
We will test this theoretical framework by conducting a comparative study. Survey data will be gathered in Belgium, the US, Argentina, and China. Further, we use an interdisciplinary approach: we will integrate relevant contributions from the criminology, organizational psychology, political science, and sociology literature, and cooperate with excellent partners in these fields.

This study intends to yield cumulative scientific knowledge and have implications for policy making and practice. The results may change the traditional way of thinking about policing and managing police organizations, and may call into question the “quasi-military” model for achieving police departments’ internal and external goals.
 

Relevant publications

- Van Craen, M. (2013). Explaining majority and minority trust in the police. Justice Quarterly, 30(6), 1042-1067.

- Van Craen, M. (2012). Determinants of ethnic minority confidence in the police. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(7), 1029-1047.

- Dirikx A., Gelders, D., Parmentier S. (2012). Police-youth relationships: A qualitative analysis of Flemish adolescents' attitudes toward the police. European Journal of Criminology, 9(2), 191-205.