 On the topic of police legitimacy, I'd like to introduce our first featured speaker of the day, Professor Tom Tyler. Professor Tyler is the Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. Professor Tyler's research explores the role of societal judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation. His work has influenced the way law enforcement and police oversight practitioners think about issues of police legitimacy and police community relations. Professor Tyler, as consulted with police departments across the country, including a recent stand helping the Chicago Police Department retrain officers in legitimacy-based models of policing. His work also serves as a model in the development of curriculum of the first ever Command College for Police Supervisors, which Professor Tyler helped establish in conjunction with fellow Yale faculty member Tracy Mears, the University of New Haven, and the New Haven Police Department. Professor Tyler was awarded the Harry Calvin Prize for Paradigm Shifting Scholarship in the study of law and society by the Law and Society Association in 2000. And in 2012, Professor Tyler was honored by the International Society for Justice Research with its Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovative Research on Social Justice. Please join me in welcoming Professor Tom Tyler. Well, thank you all for inviting me to speak to you today. It's a very exciting time for those of us who are interested in new ideas in policing. And certainly, I think that for the members of this organization, this is your moment because the issue of police accountability is on everyone's radar screen. And the question of how to deal with it is something we're all suddenly very concerned to try to think about. There are a lot of questions that we could ask about accountability. And I'm going to actually try to focus on two issues that I think are relevant to the kind of work that I've done. One is accountability to whom, and the other is accountability about what. Now, we know that right now is a pivotal moment in policing. Chuck Ramsey just gave a TED talk, and he said that there's been more discussion about what policing is about in America in the last couple of years than any time since the 1960s since the Kerner report. So I feel confident in saying that that's a general opinion. I think there's also quite a bit of disagreement about what's good or bad about policing and what should or shouldn't be changed. But everyone agrees that we're having this conversation about what policing should look like. One of the themes that I see emerging from all of this discussion is attention to the question of accountability in the sense of popular accountability, that the police should be viewed as legitimate by the people in the community. To me, this is a big shift in a lot of the discussions that have occurred about policing in the last 30 years. Many police chiefs have said at different meetings that I've been at that they basically focus their attention on controlling crime. And I often get the impression in some of these discussions that they feel that the effect on the crime rate is in and of itself accountability from the point of view of the community. The community says, why do you do this? And we say, well, it lowers the crime rate. And that's the end of the discussion, or at least it should be the end of the discussion. I'm going to argue that the issue that really is dominating our discussions about the policing has focused on the question of popular legitimacy, what we often see referred to as trust and confidence, the idea that it's important that the people in the community have trust and confidence in their police. This idea was enshrined in the president's task force report, 21st century policing, where they called legitimacy the first pillar of policing. And obviously, if we're concerned about public trust in the police, we want to ask the question, what is it about policing that shapes public trust? If public trust is a feature of accountability, how do you have to understand its dynamics? We can get technical about the idea of legitimacy. Often it's referred to, as I said, as trust and confidence, but in the discussions that academics have had about it, there are three interrelated ideas. One is trust and confidence, so you feel the police are honest, you feel like they're trying to do what's good for the people in the community, you're willing to defer to police authority, you think it's appropriate for the police to make decisions about the community, and you view the police as taking appropriate actions with regard to the community. These three things are typically found together. Okay, well, let me step back and say what I think is the important conclusion of research that's been conducted in the last 30 years. And that is that we should care, the police should care, government officials should care about legitimacy because it has a lot of important implications that affect the functioning of our legal system and promotes a number of desirable behaviors that we ought to be trying to obtain. One is that legitimacy increases deference. When we look at a lot of the highly publicized incidents that we've seen in the last few years that have resulted in police shootings, they begin in resistance and defiance of police authority. Anger, pushback, confrontation. We know from research that when people view the police as legitimate, they're less likely to do these things. They're more likely to accept police authority and so we don't go down a path that can result in these issues of use of force and the controversies that come with them. This is true of police officers, but it's also true of all kinds of authorities beyond the police, authorities like judges, but for the police, definitely. The other thing that we know is that legitimacy promotes a number of behaviors in the community that are desirable from a police perspective. When people think the police, the courts and the law are legitimate, they're more likely to obey the law. Criminal activity goes down. They cooperate with the police. They report crime, they report criminals. It was mentioned that I've worked with the New Haven Police Department. One of the really striking behavioral changes coming out of their initiatives is dramatic increase in clearance rates because people are reporting crime and identifying criminals. And people are less likely to engage in extra legal types of activity, violence, collective disturbances. They trust the legal system to manage instances of misconduct when they occur. We've noticed in the last few years other consequences when people don't trust the police. There just was another article this morning about cities giving out large sums of money to pay civil claims. Obviously, these civil claims would not arise if there weren't issues of police, citizen conflict in the first place. And we've mentioned at the beginning that some cities are under consent decrees. Obviously, public discontent is one of the things that drives the federal government to pay attention to police departments. These are all things that either you can benefit from having high legitimacy or you can be undermined by having low legitimacy. Just in general, trust in the police leads to support for established police leaders. It leads to support for funding. And I think a third factor that we often don't talk enough about is it encourages people not to support privatization of police services. Something that's a big national trend and it comes out of distrust of public policing. All right. So in all of these different ways we could think of trust like money in a community bank. This is the way we talk about it when we train police officers. You can add to it or remove it from it every time you deal with someone and then you face all of these downstream consequences that are either desirable or not desirable. Well, okay, so legitimacy is important. Why is legitimacy a topic now? And in particular, this issue of legitimacy from the point of view of the people, popular legitimacy. Let me begin by saying something that I think is widely known in the policing community. It's acknowledged in the National Academy of Sciences Report in 2004. American policing has improved tremendously in the last 30 years. The police have become more professional. They've become better able to fight crime even though we are seeing instances of police shootings actually nationally the frequency of such shootings has gone down, police corruption has gone down. So there's a lot that's objectively very good about policing. One example that I think is very striking because so much of policing has focused on crime control is that crime has gone down. It's gone down everywhere. It's gone down continuously. And if you're thinking of the goal of the police is controlling crime then the police have participated and had some role in a big success in our society. However, during this same period of time when crime has been declining the police are becoming more objectively professional public trust in the police has not increased. And I'll just give an example. This is the proportion of Americans who say that they trust their local police department from 1980 to 2014. What you can see is that it's completely flat. There hasn't been any increase in public trust in the police in the last 30 years. Now of course you could say that against a backdrop of the decline in trust in other agencies like Congress, flat is pretty good. But on the other hand, we can say well if in fact there are all these indicators of improvement then why aren't these indicators of improvement reflected in greater public trust? And why aren't the police gaining all of these behavioral benefits that would come from increased trust? Greater deference, less conflict, more acceptance of their authority, more cooperation from the community, more willingness to defer to the police to investigate wrongdoing or misconduct. Why aren't those things happening? And similarly, why isn't the gap between white and minority trust in the police closing? Why isn't that disappearing? So this is the paradox. Increases in performance without increases in popular legitimacy. Well why? I think that the basic argument is that the successes that the police have had missed the mark in terms of the issues that actually drive public trust. This is where the role for police review boards, civilian or internal comes in. People are looking for a different kind of accountability and if we understood what they were looking for we could better address public issues. All right. Well how have departments defined their mission that I'm saying is missing the mark? There's been a very strong performance orientation. That means that we provide service, we have 911 calls, we respond to calls, we focus on how quickly do we respond to calls and things of that type. Are we talking about reducing crime and as I showed you, crime is going down? We focus on objective indicators of performance. However, research shows that popular legitimacy is not centrally related to either perceived or actual performance in these dimensions. In fact, it's not even related to actual legality whether the police are actually following existing laws. Well so where does legitimacy come from? This is not coming from these indicators. The core point coming out of research on police in the last 30 years is that the primary issue that the public considers when they react to experiences with a police officer did that officer exercise their authority consistent with principles of fair procedure? Did they exercise their authority in fair ways when they dealt with me? It's not unique to the police. This is the central issue when people evaluate judges, when they evaluate political leaders, but we're talking about the police today and this definitely is the key issue that's driving public views about police legitimacy. And I would emphasize again to contrast this to the performance issue that it's more important to people than the actual outcome of their encounter with a police officer. Outcome like I got a ticket, I didn't get a ticket. I called the police, they solved my problem, they didn't solve my problem. Those are not as important as the judgment that the police officer did or didn't follow their procedures. So we have an idea about a model we could work with. Police exercise their authority fairly, they're accepted as legitimate by the public, and we have a whole series of good things that come out of that. Deference to the police, cooperation with the police. And so then the question becomes, what can we do to try to identify and build a structure around the idea of exercising authority fairly? I'll just give you one example of a research study. It's actually we have people from Oakland here. This was done in Oakland and Los Angeles a few years ago and it's a study of people's reactions to being stopped by the police. So it's a random sample of stops during a certain time period in these two cities. It focuses on the question of acceptance of police authority. So how would you evaluate an encounter you might have with the police? Would you look at the outcome? For example, they solved my problem or they didn't, I got a ticket or I didn't, or I got what I deserved or I didn't. Those are outcome judgments. A procedural judgment, the decisions were made in fair ways, I was treated fairly. And then the question, do people defer to police authority? Do they say, I accept this decision, I'm not angry, I'm not going to appeal, I'm not going to push back against this, I'm going to do it. So voluntary acceptance and deference to the police. Here, basically the idea is that for each of these ethnic groups, the height of each column represents the weight that that factor plays in deference to police authority in this most recent experience you had. You might defer because you like the outcome or you think it's fair, or you think the officer treated you fairly. Three distinct judgments and then the weight that those play. What's striking about this is the overwhelming weight that feeling fairly or unfairly treated plays in reactions to dealing with the police. And the fact that this is true across the three primary groups that were the focus of this study. Whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics. So procedural justice dominated reactions. Let me show you what this means in a practical sense. We ask the question, if you want deference to police authority, what would you look for? We divide people up on two dimensions, good outcome, bad outcome, fair treatment, unfair treatment. One way that you can get more acceptance of decisions is you can get more acceptance of the decisions through the outcome. People are better off from their point of view accepting no ticket as opposed to a ticket. And you can get about a 10% increase in deference, acceptance by providing better outcomes. But you can get a 70% increase by treating people fairly. And in particular, even when people get a bad outcome. So these are the people who are standing, they're holding their traffic ticket when they're completing this evaluation. 70% more likely to defer and accept police authority if they think the officer acted fairly. So fairness drives reactions to police authority in a powerful way. Pals for assistance, the other big thing the police do, why are people satisfied with what happens when they call the police? Similar figure, almost totally because they think the officer dealt with them fairly. So if I call you, somebody stole my stereo, I like you better if you get it back. That's about 10%. But whether you get it back or not, I'll be more satisfied about 60 to 70% if you treat me fairly. So procedural fairness is the central factor that people consider when they evaluate their trust in police officers. And that's a clue about the kind of accountability that people are looking for. Accountability in terms of fairness. All right, so we could treat every encounter that the police have with the public as a way for them to teach people about the law, a teachable moment. And what does it mean to say a procedure is fair or unfair? I'll skip the part about suing doctors. I'll tell you about that later. There are four elements that people consider when they say that a procedure is fair or unfair. One is related to decision-making. Well, let me just do this. Do this first. Okay, four issues, and then they're both about the creation and the implementation of procedures. Four issues, two about quality of decision-making, two about quality of treatment. And I would emphasize that both of those are related to both when a policy is created and when that policy is implemented. So quality of decision-making, first. Two issues and then two issues about quality of treatment. The first issue about decision-making. People want voice. People want to have the opportunity to tell their side of the story, state their case, say what they think should be done when policies are being created and when policies are being implemented. So we need to find ways to give people voice. This, I think, is a really important role for accountability agencies to give people the opportunity to be heard, to let their grievances be told in some way, told to some agent, someone who will listen to and take seriously what they have to say, both when a community is trying to decide how to be policed and when the police are acting on those policies. Neutrality is the second aspect of decision-making. Neutrality is rule-based, consistent, based upon rules and not bias. People want to know that the decisions that are being made are based upon rules. That requires transparency, requires accountability. We were talking earlier about review boards. One of the frustrating things about review boards is if they're not transparent. They don't have open hearings if they don't explain their decisions because then people can't see that justice is being done. Now, it may be true that justice is being done, but the point is people need to see that it's being done. See how the rules are being applied, how the decisions are being made. So for decision-making, voice, and neutrality, we need to explain actions, explain procedures, explain laws, let people see what's happening, how things are being done, how decisions are being made. So those are two elements of decision-making, quality of treatment, two elements also. First, respect. It's very important to people that they, as members of the community, and the concerns they bring before authorities are taken seriously. If they're treated with respect, that they're treated as people who are entitled to address legal authorities, to talk about their situation, to be taken seriously because they are members of the community. It's really important to emphasize the role of respect, courtesy, politeness, treatable with dignity because people put a lot of weight on that. So we need to think about how can we communicate the respect that people want to see from legal authority for police officers. There are a lot of things that we've found, simple things that can be done, that are very helpful, can make eye contact, you can address people by name, you can say hello to people, can try in many ways to treat them respectfully. In a police study that was done, interestingly, they taught officers, when you end every encounter with someone in the public, try to say something respectful, like thank you for wearing your seatbelt, or thank you for having such a clean car, or thank you for being so cooperative. Say something respectful, show respect for the person. Trust in the integrity of officials, trustworthiness. This is the most challenging thing to communicate. People want to believe that the authorities who exercise authority in their name are sincere, they're benevolent, they're actually trying to do the right thing. How do they make that inference? Does the person acknowledge their concerns? Does the person account for the decisions that they make in terms of the concerns that people have expressed, the things that people have said? So we need to find ways to make it clear to people that we are listening to them, that we are taking what they say seriously, that we're considering it, that we acknowledge their needs and concerns. Partly, you can explain decisions in ways that recognize the concerns that people have put forward during decision making. I think this is an area that's especially relevant to police accountability. Two areas of the law that are very difficult are police accountability and rape, and they're both difficult for very similar situational reasons. They're almost always situations where there's no other evidence besides conflicting statements. He said, she said, the officer said, the person said, in those situations, the outcome may not reflect what's really true. It may just simply be impossible to get a truthful decision. So it's especially important to provide people with evidence that they're being taken seriously. They're being listened to, their concerns, the experience they had, the pain they may feel, is taken seriously, acknowledged by the authorities, even if they can't provide a decision that a person might want to have. Now, all of these are important. Voice, neutrality, respect, and trustworthiness are all important, but I think the thing that I would emphasize because it's often not paid much attention to is the consistent importance of interpersonal treatment. People, when they are treated disrespectfully, are with a lack of courtesy, or rudeness, or humiliation, that becomes the central feature in their reaction to their experience with a legal authority. We know that the complaint files of most major departments are dominated by these kind of complaints, rudeness, humiliation, disrespect, because this is a big issue to the people who are dealing with the police. So we need to think about policing in a new way to address issues of popular legitimacy. We need to think about how the public thinks about policing, what the public cares about, and in particular, we need to go back to an idea that I think was important in community policing, that we take seriously the ideas that the community has, the feelings of the people in the community, the views of the people in the community, when policies are being developed and when policies are being enacted. It's always, of course, central to any discussion about policing, to acknowledge Heel and his original principles of policing, but what's interesting is the degree to which these original principles focus on the idea of cooperation, acceptance by the public. And so if we go back to that, we're going back to thinking about where does that acceptance come from? One final point to make is, this is not just about encounters that people have with the police. Think about it on a community level. I'll just talk about, this is a recent study of Americans and their relationship to the police and their community. You know that most people in many communities don't deal with the police very much, but they have opinions about what the police are doing and those opinions affect their behavior. So what matters? The police are legitimate. I trust the police. The police act lawfully in my community. The police effectively manage problems like crime in my community. And again, what kind of behavior do we want from the public? Compliance with the law, cooperation with the police, or even engagement in the community. Now you'll recognize this form of a graph. It's the strength of these different factors. Legitimacy, lawfulness, and effectiveness. Why do people comply with the law? Big impact of whether they think the police in their community are legitimate. Why do they report crime? Big impact. Why will they testify in court? Why will they not engage in private retaliation but rather talk to the police about a problem? All driven by a concern about whether the police are trustworthy and legitimate in their community. But the other thing that I think is important to point to is we can imagine a more central role for the police in the future and that is as a positive force that helps communities to develop. Police chiefs say all the time you can't arrest your way out of crime and what can you do about it? Promote economic and social development in your community. Try to build the community to lower the crime rate. The police can be reassuring. If they treat people fairly, if people have an anticipation that they will receive fair treatment from the police, they aren't just more likely to work with the police to find crime but they're also more likely to engage in their community. To shop in the community, to vote in the community, we see that they are more likely to work with their neighbors to solve neighborhood problems if they have this framework of trust and reassurance. So the police, as they move forward into a new role in the 21st century where violent crime is less central to their mission, have an important role in helping communities to develop. Now again, bringing all this back to the question of what has this got to do with accountability. We know the kind of accountability that people are looking for and we can try to design forums that provide people with the kinds of accountability that they need to be reassured and to trust the police. That builds public trust and confidence in the police and leads to all these kinds of desirable behavioral outcomes. Thank you.