Fairness Within: Sources and Consequences of Procedural Fairness in Police Agencies

Over the last decade, scholars have become increasingly attentive to the role of procedural fairness in shaping police officer attitudes and behaviors. In Chapter 1, I review key developments within this research, and identify several theoretical and methodological issues present in the current literature. I then outline the issues I seek to address through the three studies presented in this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I explore a divergence in how scholars conceptualize and measure sources of internal procedural fairness (IPF) within police departments. I discuss the implications of these divergences, and then compare three conceptualizations of IPF sources. I find that officers appear to form separate IPF judgement for each source, and that each procedural fairness judgment has unique associations with several outcomes. In Chapter 3, I examine the relationship between internal procedural fairness and officer engagement in external procedural fairness (EPF). Drawing upon the group engagement model (GEM), I argue that the relationship between IPF and EPF is mediated by organizational identification. Comparing the GEM against the prevailing explanation for this relationship, I find that the GEM better accounts for the relationship between IPF and EPF. In Chapter 4, I explore the role of organizational emphasis in shaping police officer support for several different policing strategies. The GEM suggests that IPF will simply bond officers to organizational goals and norms; it is this bond that motivates officers to adopt the strategies emphasized by their department. Examining support for several policing strategies, I find that officers who are more committed to their agency are more sensitive to changes in the emphasis placed on specific strategies. In Chapter 5, I review the findings of the various studies presented in this dissertation and discuss the implications of this research. Collectively, these three studies offer several insights into how IPF shapes police officer attitudes and behaviors. They highlight the importance of officer identification with organizational norms and value in shaping police officer attitudes and behaviors and establish new avenues for IPF research within police organizations.