Ben Bradford

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Verified

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• PhD, London School of Economics
• Professor at University College London

In our study of everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield in north-west England), numerous sources of data suggest that annoyance about cars—their volume, speed, (bad) parking, presence at the school gate, and overall effect on the quality and character of everyday life in the town—loom large in the preoccupations of local people. It has...

Objectives Explore why people react so strongly to procedural injustice experienced by others. One possibility is that people recognise the marginalisation and psychological harm that injustice can cause. Methods An online experiment tested whether exposure to procedurally unjust police behaviour directed at crime victims would influence participa...

Existing evidence suggests exposure to police activity negatively impacts the mental health of the policed. But research on whether, and why, police activity is correlated with the prevalence of mental health challenges among individuals and in specific areas remains piecemeal. We conducted a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) of the literature examin...

Written by key names in the field, this book explores the impact of digitization and COVID-19 on justice in housing and special needs education. It analyses access to justice, offers recommendations for improvement and provides valuable insights into administrative justice from user perspectives.

Whereas existing literature has pointed to a connection between policing and adverse mental health outcomes, it primarily focuses on Black populations within the context of disproportionate police contact and the policing of racially minoritised communities. We conducted a rapid evidence assessment of the literature examining the association betwee...

Public trust in the police is an almost ever-present feature of United Kingdom policy, political and indeed cultural debates, and this has been true right across the past quarter century. Concentrating on the population-level picture, and on England and Wales, in this article I outline what we know about changes in ‘trust and confidence’ over the p...

Despite widespread assumptions, there is surprisingly little firm evidence on the extent of police activity among people who face, and in areas where people face, more mental health and well-being challenges in the United Kingdom. We conducted a secondary analysis of existing data from four different sources to examine the relationship between poli...

The legitimacy of legal institutions, particularly the police, has consistently been linked to questions of obligation and compliance. According to procedural justice theory, when the police enforce the law in normatively appropriate ways, consensual rather than coercive policing bolsters not only their own legitimacy, but also that of the law. On...

Chapter 8, Marginalized Groups and Unmet Legal Needs, explores how the pandemic has affected access to advice and redress for marginalized groups. Already marginalized communities are likely to be affected the most by the pandemic. Yet, we know relatively little about how members of these groups are accessing the justice system and what can be done...

Chapter 7, Access to Digital Justice, asks the central question: how accessible is online justice? This chapter explores how those who administer justice, those who provide advice and those who use the online justice system experience it. In doing so, we explore how the use of technology in the justice system is shaped by, and may reshape, people’s...

Chapter 9, Conclusion: Digital Journeys, brings together the empirical findings of the project and critically assesses what we have learned from doing research with marginalized groups and how we might rethink the approaches to understanding access to justice. We offer a more nuanced understanding of people’s digital journeys through bringing proce...

Chapter 5, ‘Pathways through the AJS – SEND’, follows a similar structure to Chapter 4; it explores the ideal case help-seeker journeys for people with issues around SEND to understand how access has been compromised and which pathways to justice are difficult to negotiate or blocked. The LGSCO, the PHSO and the SEND Tribunal provide redress for SE...

Through the lens of procedural justice theory, Chapter 2, Trust in Administrative Justice, captures people’s experiences of, and sensibilities towards, moving parts of the AJS online. Prior research has found that procedural justice and the trust and legitimacy it engenders helps to strengthen people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, cour...

In Chapter 1, Legal Needs and Access to Justice, we develop the argument for a holistic vision of access to justice. We expand Wrbka’s definition of ‘the concept of access to justice that embodies the ideal that everybody, regardless of his or her capabilities, should have the chance to enjoy the protection and enforcement of his or her rights by t...

Chapter 4, Pathways through the AJS – Housing, explores the pathways to redress available to people through mapping the ideal case help-seeker journeys for people with issues around housing to understand how access points have been compromised and which pathways to justice are difficult to negotiate or even blocked. The Housing Ombudsman and the Pr...

In Chapter 3, Two Areas of Law in Context and the Help-Seeker Journey, we provide the context for the pathways to SEND and pathways to housing. The help-seeker journey follows the person with a problem and legal need through different stages of seeking help, finding advice and reaching an ombuds or tribunal to resolve their problem. For housing we...

This book extends existing research by examining the effect of rapid digitalization and the notion of digital justice on the delivery of justice. We follow help-seeker pathways to justice across two areas: housing and special educational needs and disabilities. We question whether a siloed landscape of advice, NGOs, tribunals and ombuds can provide...

In Chapter 6, Exploring the Role of Procedural Justice in Tribunals and Ombuds, we draw on data and findings produced by our online experimental study. We consider the idea that experiencing procedural justice during tribunals and ombuds hearings is important not only in shaping legitimacy but also in influencing perceptions of outcome fairness, sa...

Driven by social and technological change and the imperative to enhance efficiency, UK police forces have in recent years adopted various technologies to transform their interactions with the public. These initiatives often fall under "transformation" agendas with a significant technological focus, promoting "channel choice" strategy to facilitate...

Police in England and Wales are under growing pressure to respond to multiple demands, with budgets and capabilities failing to keep pace. Alongside this, public scandals and wrongdoing in policing is regularly revealed, debated and fed into reform programmes. Recognising these issues, we ask what members of the public really want from policing. In...

There is a need for a common approach for constructing and implementing public opinion surveys on policing across different jurisdictions. This standardization would facilitate more accurate comparisons and tracking of public attitudes over time. The authors of the source article developed a cost-effective survey instrument by identifying 13 core i...

Objectives: The police killing of George Floyd energized the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement across the United States in the summer of 2020. We test the impact on public perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of the police and law. Methods: A four-state, three-wave, short-term longitudinal study ( N = 1048; Arizona, Michigan, New York,...

Against the backdrop of what seems like a perpetual cycle of crisis for policing in modern day England and Wales, this introduction synthesises some of the core challenges facing the police. A catalogue of crimes committed by serving officers, missed opportunities for reform, and a scathing review of the internal culture of the Metropolitan Police...

Trust in the police in England and Wales has diminished steadily over the past decade. Police still enjoy levels of trust that other some institutions might envy, so calling this a crisis risks over‐statement. Yet, declining trust and intense media, political and social pressure on police—symbolised by a number of high‐profile instances of police f...

“Free Text Is Essentially the Enemy of What We’re Trying to Achieve”: The Framing of a National Vision for Delivering Digital Police Contact Police organizations in England and Wales, as in many other contexts, are increasingly shifting crime reporting and other public-facing contact online. In this article, we explore the beliefs, motivations and...

Objectives To systematically review the effect of social identity and social contexts on the association between procedural justice and legitimacy in policing. Methods A meta-analysis synthesising data from 123 studies (N = 200,966) addressing the relationship between procedural justice and legitimacy in policing. Random effects univariate and two...

Much policy discourse concentrates on the contribution police make to keeping people safe. Often, this means minimizing fear of crime. Yet, more expansive accounts stress the extent to which deeper-rooted forms of security and belonging might also be important ‘outcomes’ of police activity. Using data collected from a survey of residents of a mid-s...

What crimes and security concerns trouble differently-situated groups of people today? What demands for action do these prompt from different authorities? To what extent are contemporary insecurities mediated through people’s sense of place and attendant feelings of belonging? The field of criminology used to be confident that it knew how to answer...

This chapter explains the profound implications of digital society on the questions of crime, security, surveillance, and policing. In recent decades, digital technologies brought profound changes to human societies and the way they are governed. The chapter explains that digital processes do more than accelerate the production and availability of...

Objectives To systematically review the evidence of the relationship between policing and collective efficacy. Methods A systematic review and meta-analysis synthesising data from 16 studies (4 experimental/quasi-experimental, 12 observational) assessing the relationship between policing and collective efficacy. Results Overall, police trustworth...

The stopmtl.ca project uses a participatory mapping methodology to allow individuals to self-report their police stop experiences in the city of Montreal, Canada. This report provides preliminary analyses on the social and spatial distribution of police stop experiences.

Defiance can be a powerful mechanism of protest against police oppression. At the same time, citizen defiance to police authority is problematic for police and can cause injury to both police officers and the public. Research shows that some groups of people defy police more than others, and that defiance often represents a reaction to disenfranchi...

Studies on antiquities trafficking have often been overshadowed by research looking at the trafficking of human beings, drugs, and weapons, a fact partly motivated by the arguably higher relevance and greater security implications involved in these other forms of illicit trade. However, the past decade of conflicts in the Middle East has revived an...

The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...

Objective: We assessed the factors that legitimized the police in the United States at an important moment of history, just after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. We also evaluated one way of incorporating perceptions of systemic racism into procedural justice theory. Hypotheses: We tested two primary hypotheses. The first hypothesis was...

Research regularly finds significant variation in the perceived trustworthiness of police across different social groups. For example, studies from a number of different countries have shown that people from particular ethnic and racial minority groups tend to have less positive evaluations and lower expectations of police effectiveness, benevolenc...

Police stop and search activity has consistently been shown to affect the opinions, attitudes and behaviours of those subject to it. For young people in particular this can be an important moment in which they learn about and orientate themselves towards law, authority, and the exercise of power. Drawing on work into procedural justice and legal so...

In recent years, police forces in the United Kingdom have introduced various technologies that alter the methods by which they interact with the public. In a parallel development, many forces have also begun to embrace the concept of procedural justice as a method through which to secure legitimacy and (in turn) public compliance and cooperation. W...

Police in England, Scotland and Wales operate largely unarmed and have done since the formation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. Yet, despite the long history of unarmed policing in Britain, terror attacks in the UK and Europe and a putative rise in serious violent crime have led to an increase in the deployment of firearms officers and c...

Police in England, Scotland and Wales operate largely unarmed and have done since the formation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. Yet, despite the long history of unarmed policing in Britain, terror attacks in the UK and Europe and a putative rise in serious violent crime have led to an increase in the deployment of firearms officers and c...

This article examines data collected from users of the German Federal Ombudsman Scheme (GFOS). The data was collected as part of a research project to understand how the GFOS operates in practice and how its procedures and outcomes are accepted by its users. We begin from the premise that experience of procedural justice during this alternative dis...

In the spring and summer of 2020, police in the United States killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other unarmed people of color. In one of the largest social movements in the nation’s history, thousands engaged in public protests and called to defund or abolish the police. Debate about police racism and the need for reform intensified, with pub...

Police departments regularly conduct public opinion surveys to measure attitudes towards the police. The results of these surveys can be used to shape and evaluate policing policy and practice. Yet the extant evidence base is hampered when people use different methods and when there is no common data standard. In this paper we present a set of 13 c...

Police departments regularly conduct public opinion surveys to measure attitudes towards the police. The results of these surveys can be used to shape and evaluate policing policy and practice. Yet the extant evidence base is hampered when people use different methods and when there is no common data standard. In this paper we present a set of 13 c...

Interest in the political economy of crime goes back to sociology’s founding fathers, but the nature of the relationship between restrictive social security systems and crime remains contested. This paper exploits exogenous variation in the introduction of Universal Credit (UC) to local areas across England and Wales to address this question. We fi...

The excellent target article raises much food for thought. In this commentary we first discuss what is included in their proposed category of ‘positive evaluations and responses to police assertions of power to attempt social influence’. We then consider some of the implications of the concentric diagram for our understanding of police authority an...

In the spring and summer of 2020, police in the U.S. killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other unarmed people of colors. Thousands across the country engaged in public protests and called to defund or abolish the police, constituting one of the largest social movements in the nation’s history. Public views on the Black Lives Matter movement are...

We examine consensual and coercive police–citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self‐regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual a...

Data from mobile phones are regularly used in the investigation of crime and court proceedings. Previously published research has primarily addressed technical issues or provided operational manuals for using forensic science evidence, rather than analysing human factors and the implementation of forensic tools in investigation settings. Moreover,...

Through a consideration of the use of mobile devices by the police and the public, this chapter explores some of the potential issues raised by the incorporation of technology. What internal challenges should be considered for police organisations? What impact may the expansion of technologically mediated interactions have on public perceptions of...

In the UK, knife crime continues to be a persistent and worrying concern. Media campaigns are often used by police and anti-knife crime organisations in an attempt to discourage young people from picking up a weapon. Many focus on the potentially devastating consequences associated with carrying a weapon, with the aim of provoking fear and thus a d...

Objective: We conducted an exploratory study testing procedural justice theory with a novel population. We assessed the extent to which police procedural justice, effectiveness, legitimacy, and perceived risk of sanction predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness. Hypotheses: We did not develop formal a priori hypothe...

Objectives To test whether normative and non-normative forms of obligation to obey the police are empirically distinct and to assess whether they exhibit different dynamics in terms of the downstream effects of police-citizen contact.Methods Analysing data from the Scottish Community Engagement Trial of procedurally just policing, we use natural ef...

Objectives Test the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on...

Collective efficacy is a neighbourhood social process that has important benefits for crime prevention. Policing is thought to be one antecedent to collective efficacy, but the mechanisms by which police activity and officer behaviour are thought to foster collective efficacy are not well understood. This article presents findings from a rapid evid...

The use of force is arguably the defining feature of police. Yet this power is often controversial: a key node in the contest and debate that almost always swirls around police, with the question of race never far from such contestation. In this paper, we consider the influence of race in responses to use of force incidents among British-based samp...

This chapter, for consideration at the Research Handbook in Law & Psychology edited by Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, has three interlinked themes. First, key to legitimation are relational norms that carry identity-related messages about status, equality and respect. Second, relational concerns extend beyond status, value and standing, to include agen...

Drawing on work into procedural justice and legal socialisation, we test the empirical link between experiences of stop and search and the extent to which male adolescents hold negative gendered beliefs regarding sexuality and intimate partner relations. We reason that procedurally unfair stop/searches can signal to young people that it is ‘ok’ to...

Objectives Test whether (1) people view a policing decision made by an algorithm as more or less trustworthy than when an officer makes the same decision; (2) people who are presented with a specific instance of algorithmic policing have greater or lesser support for the general use of algorithmic policing in general; and (3) people use trust as a...

In this entry we concentrate on empirical legitimacy. Taking the perspective of those subject to (and beneficiaries of) police power, we first discuss the conceptual definition of legitimacy as a component of the relationship between police and public. On what basis can it be claimed that people believe that the police have the right to power and t...

Objectives: Test whether: (1) people view a policing decision made by an algorithm as more or less trustworthy than when an officer makes the same decision; (2) people who are presented with a specific instance of algorithmic policing have greater or lesser support for the general use of algorithmic policing in general; and (3) people use trust as...

Areas high in collective efficacy – where residents know and trust one another and are willing to intervene to solve neighbourhood problems – tend to experience less crime. Policing is thought to be one antecedent to collective efficacy, but little empirical research has explored this question. Using three waves of survey data collected from London...

The use of force is arguably the defining feature of police. Yet this power is often controversial: a key node in the contest and debate that almost always swirls around police, with the question of race never far from such contestation. In this paper, we consider the influence of race in responses to use of force incidents among British-based samp...

We explore young people's experiences and perceptions of knife crime, and we compare these to the understanding of police experts, to explore the perceptions shaping trust in the police and policing. We carry out an experience sampling survey deployed using a mobile application reflecting on safety and knife crime, to understand young people's dail...

We explore young people’s experiences and perceptions of knife crime, and we compare these to the understanding of police experts, to explore the perceptions shaping trust in the police and policing. We carry out an experience sampling survey deployed using a mobile application reflecting on safety and knife crime, to understand young people’s dail...

Some immigrants can be reluctant to cooperate with the police due to experiences of social exclusion and discrimination. Procedural justice scholars argue that people cooperate with police when they feel the police are just and fair because such treatment motivates identification with social categories that police represent. In this paper, we consi...

Social identity is a core aspect of procedural justice theory, which predicts that fair treatment at the hands of power holders such as police expresses, communicates and generates feelings of inclusion, status and belonging within salient social categories. In turn, a sense of shared group membership with power-holders, with police officers as pow...

Objectives Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether perceived police legitimacy predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods, but not in strong-norm neighborhoods where most people are either willing or u...

Police departments regularly conduct public opinion surveys to measure attitudes towards the police. The results of these surveys can be used to shape and evaluate policing policy and practice. Yet the extant evidence base is hampered when people use different methods and when there is no common data standard. In this paper we present a set of 13 c...

How do social norms and legal requirements combine to shape collective behaviour? A multi-wave ten-city panel study set during the first UK lockdown finds that compliance was a powerful in-group signalling device, driven by the expressive and coordinating power of formal and informal rules. COVID-19 pandemic laws allowed the Government to operate a...

Police organisations have a wealth of experience in responding to emergencies, but COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of the speed, scale and complexity of developing doctrine and its implementation by officers. The crisis also threw into sharp relief the fact that police policy and, crucially, practice are always implemented within wider social, p...

Objectives. Bring people’s perceptions of systemic racism into procedural justice theory. Test an expanded model of police legitimacy that includes people’s perceptions of the under-policing and over-policing of Black communities. Methods. A cross-sectional survey based on a quota sample of 1,500 US residents designed to resemble the general popula...