Assessing Procedural Justice During Police-Citizen Encounters with Officer Surveys, Citizen Surveys, and Systematic Social Observations, Norfolk, VA, 2017-2019

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This study aimed to improve the understanding of procedural justice during police-citizen encounters with a comprehensive approach including officer surveys, systematic social observations, and citizen surveys. First, the study used officer surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of a procedural justice training program in Norfolk, Virginia. In 2017, an eight-hour training was conducted for all Norfolk police officers. A pretest and posttest survey was given to each officer during the training, which asked about their opinions on a multitude of statements representing the key elements of procedural justice in policing (e.g., voice, respect, trustworthiness, and neutrality). In 2019, the officers were given a second-wave survey to assess the long-term effects of the training. The study also examined officers' procedurally fair behavior during interactions and citizens' behavioral responses through systematic social observations of police-citizen interactions captured by the police body-worn cameras. Patrol shifts were randomly selected and observed between December 2017 and March 2019. The third component included a survey of citizens who interacted with the police during the observation period. Randomly selected officers were, prior to the shift, encouraged to hand out survey cards to all citizens they encountered. These cards invited the citizens to take a survey online. Citizens could also give their phone numbers to the officers so that they could be contacted to take the survey over the phone. The goal of the citizen survey was to obtain information about the citizens' opinions of the Norfolk police in general and the specific encounters they had with the Norfolk police. Taken together, the three components of this study offered a systematic understanding of the policing issues related to procedural justice, including officers' perceptions about procedural justice, officers' procedurally fair behavior during interactions, citizens' behavioral responses, and citizens' subjective evaluations of their encounters.