The Importance Of Police Legitimacy

n order for police to effectively police an area they must have cooperation. With this comes the ability to lower the crime rate and make the community feel more secure, but how is this done? Police alone cannot make people feel secure and community members cannot make others feel safer alone either, this come when they are both working together. This is linked to police legitimacy by how the community feels about the police. If there is a negative feeling towards to police than the people are going to be less likely to follow the laws, and not obey the people who enforce them. Legitimacy is the feeling that you need to follow the laws set forth, this sets the standard at which people go away from their self-interests and allow people to appeal
Legitimacy can be threated heavily by bad publicity as seen in recent years, but this can also help the police in a way. Voluntary support of the police has been surging since people have started targeting police, this is a way for police to be involved in the community without being there. With people sticking up for the police or making sure that community members are following the most basic laws that police may not have time to handle. With all this legitimacy of the police and their ability to govern and police are still holding strong in most communities. There is often time when police go to areas that are rough and police are seen badly so that they can improve their outlook with the people. Without legitimacy of the police it is nearly impossible for laws to be enforced, with this comes the idea of how effective can they be if no one sees them as legitimate. However, this is being challenged in recent years with the growing number of people who are looking to cops and helping them. With them come more and more urgency to feel secure in the communities as people look to the police for help and guidance for the law and how they want their community to
have increased at alarming rates, now with research we can see why this is happening. However, when the average person looks at this they see two things; one is the police are doing their job and getting criminals off the street, or police are just targeting people and this is way to control them. Now there is always a call from community members to their elected officials, local, state, and federal, to tackle the crime problems in their area. However, what this leads to is more political hands in the pot. What this also calls for this is more government accountability in what they are doing. With this going on though it makes the public’s view on crime hazy. So, to start off the laws are made by government officials who take stats from all over to look at crime, they also want to keep their federal funding coming. This is an ethics issue where there can be research that shows that crime in the area is down but they will leave certain parts of it out. When making these laws they also look at moral values, so what is right and what is wrong. These agencies look at all of this before implementing a policy or law in place. One agency is the Bureau of Justice Statistics; they collect, analyze, and publish information on crime for the government and influence policy. They must be accurate with their data since it is essential to guide and inform Local, State, and Federal laws and policies on crime and the administration of how to