Procedural Justice in Citizens’ Subjective Experiences

This chapter examines citizens’ subjective experiences with the Schenectady and Syracuse police: citizens’ satisfaction with how police treated them and how police handled their problem; citizens’ judgments about the procedural justice of the police in their contact, and citizens’ judgments about the outcomes of their contacts. A preliminary model of citizens’ subjective experience is analyzed. Patterns of subjective experience in Schenectady and Syracuse are similar to those reported in previous research, with fairly high levels of satisfaction, and with 60 to 65 percent in the high range of scores on the procedural justice index. Procedural justice is composed of a set of tightly associated features of subjective experience; one factor was distilled from a factor analysis, and the additive index formed by the nine survey items has a high level of reliability.