Rick J Trinkner

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Arizona State University

The group engagement model (GEM) suggests that a fair internal climate within police departments enhances officer support for fair policing. However, prior work has not considered the role of peers in creating a fair climate, the theoretical positioning of legitimacy perceptions, and the possible unintended effects of internal fairness. Active-duty...

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,...

Purpose Measuring the normative obligation to obey the police, a key component of police legitimacy, has proven difficult. Pósch et al.’s (2021) proposed scales appear to overcome the problems associated with traditional measures. This study introduces new items for these scales and empirically assesses whether such additions have the desired effe...

Objective: Our goal in the present study was to use longitudinal data to assess how normative (i.e., consensually motivated) and instrumental (i.e., coercively motivated) obligation to obey police changed after police murdered George Floyd and whether these changes differed by political ideology. Hypotheses: Using procedural justice theory, we hypo...

This study empirically evaluates a normative obligation to obey the police scale that was introduced by Pósch et al. (2021) to address problems with traditional obligation measures. The objective is twofold: (1) to assess the measurement qualities of the scale, and (2) to test the scale’s direct and mediating effects on theoretically-relevant varia...

Research about school resource officers (SROs) has focused on their ability to legally intervene and detain or arrest youth. On many campuses, though, their role extends beyond that of law enforcement to include mentorship, counseling, and education. The current study draws on qualitative interviews with and a survey of SROs from the Phoenix, Arizo...

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...

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...

Sexual assaults are underreported to the police, even though this crime affects one in four college women. Using a vignette design, this study fills a gap in the literature by examining the influence of prior police perceptions, procedurally unjust treatment, and the sex of the responding officer on college women's likelihood to report sexual assau...

Hamm et al.’s (Legal Criminol. Psychol., 27, 2022) concentric diagram of legitimacy has a lot to offer by providing order and structure to a disjointed and sometimes confusing literature. However, enthusiasm for the concentric diagram wanes when considering its potential as a catalyst for the development of an integrated theory of legitimacy. The c...

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 the role that exposure to neighborhood and police violence plays in the legal socialization of adolescents aged 11 to 14 years living in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In a context of idiosyncratic and violent policing, where the state's ability to control crime is low, we assess the extent to which being exposed to neighborhood crime an...

Social capital can help formerly incarcerated individuals navigate the challenges of life after prison. Yet, these individuals are unlikely to receive the trust from others that is necessary to build the relationships from which social capital and social support flow. To date, little research has examined individuals’ willingness to extend trust an...

A popular model of legal socialization contends that interactions with authority figures impact the internalization of pro-social values and beliefs, including authority legitimacy. Simultaneously, subcultural theories, including the code of the street, emphasize that negative contextual and experiential factors promote subcultural beliefs. The cur...

The invariance thesis posits that the effects of procedural justice judgments on police legitimacy beliefs are consistent across a variety of contexts, including urban neighborhoods. An alternative argument, one steeped in the relational model of authority, holds that procedural justice effects are weaker in high-crime communities where residents d...

This article presents the 2021 JSI special issue on legal socialization, which we planned to celebrate the legal socialization scholarship that was largely initiated by a special issue of JSI (1971, Vol. 27, Issue 2) published 50 years ago. In its broadest sense, legal socialization refers to the process by which people develop their relationship w...

This article presents the 2021 JSI special issue on legal socialization, which we planned to celebrate legal socialization scholarship that was largely initiated by a previous special issue of JSI (1971, Vol. 27, Issue 2) published 50 years ago. In its broadest sense, legal socialization refers to the process by which people develop their relations...

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...

The procedural justice model is a common framework for understanding how and why fair procedures conveyed by legal authorities (such as police officers) shape the legal socialization process. The present contribution draws upon self‐determination theory (SDT) to advance the procedural justice model through its focus on internalization, in terms of...

Recent research in the United States has argued that the threat of confirming the “racist cop” stereotype may paradoxically increase the propensity for coercive policing by depressing officers’ self-legitimacy. The current study aimed to assess the influence of the threat of the “racist cop” stereotype on officers’ self-legitimacy and their attitud...

Historically, police have struggled to build trust and legitimacy in communities of color where the tumultuous relationship between the police and community have created contentious encounters, some ending in police use of force. Events in recent years, such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, among numerous other highly publici...

In its most general sense, legal socialization refers to the process through which individuals develop values, attitudes, and beliefs about laws, the institutions that create law, and the people that enforce law (Finckenauer, 1998; Trinkner & Cohn, 2014). While seminal works in the field (e.g., Cohn & White, 1990; Tapp & Levine, 1974) referred to i...

Objectives: Traditional police procedural justice theory argues that citizen perceptions of fair treatment by police officers increases police legitimacy, which leads to an increased likelihood of legal compliance. Recently, Nagin and Telep (2017) criticized these causal assumptions, arguing that prior literature has not definitively ruled out reve...

Objectives Chicago’s Project Safe Neighborhoods focused deterrence program is an effective crime reduction policy. However, similar to other focused deterrence programs, prior evaluations have not empirically established the mechanisms of change believed to underlie the program. The purpose of this paper was to address this gap by examining the inf...

With the emergence of police legitimacy as a major indicator of good policing, scholars have continued to push our conceptual understanding of this construct. In recent years, a debate has emerged about whether four factors—lawfulness, procedural justice, distributive justice, and effectiveness—are possible sources of legitimacy judgments (Tyler in...

With the emergence of police legitimacy as a major indicator of good policing, scholars have continued to push our conceptual understanding of this construct. In recent years, a debate has emerged about whether four factors—lawfulness, procedural justice, distributive justice, and effectiveness—are possible sources of legitimacy judgments (Tyler, 2...

Researchers have linked police officers’ concerns with appearing racist —a kind of stereotype threat—to racial disparities in the use of force. This study presents the first empirical test of the hypothesized psychological mechanism linking stereotype threat to police support for violence. We hypothesized that stereotype threat undermines officers’...

Objectives This study tests the effects of procedurally unfair treatment by 911 dispatchers on behavioral intentions to cooperate with criminal justice professionals. Methods A factorial vignette design and a university-based sample (N = 488) were used. This study used two different vignettes, each of which involved a different type of emergency (...

Existing research finds adolescent popularity to be correlated with risk-taking. While a subset of this research uses longitudinal methods to examine whether part of this correlation may reflect the influence of popularity on risk-taking, research has paid insufficient attention to examining the reverse relation. Drawing on literature from a range...

This paper expands previous conceptualizations of appropriate police behavior beyond procedural justice. The focus of the current study is on the notion of bounded authority-that is, acting within the limits of one's rightful authority. According to work on legal socialization, U.S. citizens come to acquire three dimensions of values that determine...

This paper expands previous conceptualizations of appropriate police behavior beyond procedural justice. The focus of the current study is on the notion of bounded authority – i.e. acting within the limits of one’s rightful authority. According to work on legal socialization, US citizens come to acquire three dimensions of values that determine how...

This paper expands previous conceptualizations of appropriate police behavior beyond procedural justice. The focus of the current study is on the notion of bounded authority – i.e. acting within the limits of one’s rightful authority. According to work on legal socialization, US citizens come to acquire three dimensions of values that determine how...

Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to compl...

Legal socialization is the process by which children and adolescents acquire their law-related values. Such values, in particular legitimacy, underlie the ability and willingness to consent to laws and defer to legal authorities and make legitimacy-based legal systems possible. In their absence people relate to the law as coercion and respond to re...

As argued throughout this volume, trust matters. This importance has spawned a number of major contemporary efforts to increase trust in numerous domains. These efforts typically seek to leverage the best available science for understanding and motivating trust but it is, as yet, not well understood to what degree trust is essentially the same or i...

Legal socialization is the process whereby people develop their relationship with the law via the acquisition of law-related values, attitudes, and reasoning capacities. Research on legal socialization distinguishes between two different orientations toward the law: coercive and consensual. Coercive orientations are rooted in the use of force and p...

Procedural justice theory predicts a relationship between police behaviour, individuals’ normative evaluation of police and decisions to comply with laws. Yet, prior studies of procedural justice have rather narrowly defined the potentially relevant predicates of police behaviour. This study expands the scope of procedural justice theory by conside...

Recent clashes between law enforcement and the public have led to increased attention on policing strategies that build trust and motivate cooperation in communities through the application of fair procedures and decision-making. A growing body of policing research has highlighted that officers commonly report working within police departments that...

Discussions of issues confronting law enforcement can be enhanced by using a social psychological perspective that emphasizes the importance of contexts’ influence on internal capacities and characteristics to the understanding of human behavior. This chapter shows the utility of such an approach within the context of racial disparities in policing...

Traditionally, legal socialization theory and research has been dominated by a cognitive developmental approach. However, more recent work (e.g., Fagan & Tyler, 2005) has used procedural justice to explain the legal socialization process. This article presents 2 studies that expand this approach by testing a procedural justice model of legal social...

The traditional procedure for administering lineups is to present all lineup members simultaneously (i.e., at the same time). An alternative procedure was developed by Lindsay and Wells (1985), in which lineup members were presented sequentially (i.e., one at a time). A meta-analysis (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001) reported that sequenti...

The advisor-advisee relationship is a critical part of traditional and online doctoral education. This paper describes two types of justice—distributive and procedural—and their importance to the advisor-advisee relationship. Distributive justice refers to the fairness of the outcomes that result from interacting with one's advisor while procedural...

Legal socialization is the process by which individuals acquire beliefs about rules and rule-violation by internalizing codified, normative rules within society. In the integrated legal socialization model, legal attitudes are mediators between legal/moral reasoning and rule-violating behavior (RVB; Cohn, Bucolo, Rebellon, & Van Gundy, 2010). In th...

Both law and society scholars and developmental psychologists have focused on the legitimacy of authority figures, although in different domains (police versus parents). The purpose of the current research is to bridge these two fields by examining the relations among parenting style (i.e., authoritarian, authoritative, permissive), the perception...