The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Student Blogger - Fall WIP: Aziz Huq discusses mechanisms for producing community cooperation in counter-terrorism policing

In mid-2010, citizens of Birmingham, UK, took to the streets to protest the installation of 200 closed-circuit television cameras throughout the city. The cameras weren’t in and of themselves the reason for the demonstration—after all, with an estimated 500,000 cameras in London alone, CCTV has become a begrudgingly accepted fact of daily life in the United Kingdom. Instead, the outcry was sparked by police deception. Whereas the police had initially claimed the cameras would be used primarily for monitoring traffic crimes and common delinquency, the cameras were in fact paid for out of a counter-terrorism fund and installed around predominately Muslim neighborhoods. Following the protest and subsequent media coverage, the cameras were promptly dismantled. 

This episode serves as a powerful illustration of the issue at the heart of a paper delivered by Professor Aziz Huq at a recent WIP talk. Written with Professors Tom K. Tyler and Stephen J. Schulhofer of the NYU School of Law, the paper, Mechanisms for Eliciting Cooperation in Counter-Terrorism Policing: A Study of British Muslims, offers a data-driven analysis of how policing tactics impact the willingness of citizens to cooperate voluntarily with counter-terrorism efforts, and, given its likely significance on the efficacy of policing efforts, how community cooperation can best be produced.

As was recognized by Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, founders of London’s Metropolitan Police, the greater the degree of cooperation between the police and the community being policed, the lesser the need for “physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.” This intuition has been confirmed by empirical studies that strongly suggest that policing strategies based on “collective efficacy”—that is, achieving commonly held community goals—are significantly more effective at crime reduction than those that do not engage the public.

As Professor Huq notes, it’s not immediately obvious that the same strategies would be successful in policing terrorism. For instance, terrorism is both a more geographically diffuse and more intricately coordinated threat than any individual crime. However, there is a growing consensus that community cooperation is a pivotally important element of terrorism policing. Information about suspected terrorist activities, for example, may circulate within a discrete, insular community long before police are able to detect it. Strategies that encourage the voluntary sharing of this information would increase the efficacy of terrorism policing while lessening the invasiveness of police tactics.

Drawing on interview responses from randomly selected members of the British Muslim community in London, Professor Huq and his co-authors evaluated three commonly offered mechanisms for eliciting community cooperation with counter-terrorism policing. In their model, cooperation is defined both generally as a receptivity toward helping counter-terrorism efforts and specifically as a willingness to alert police of a suspected terror threat.

The first mechanism was instrumentalism, or a rational choice theory of behavior. According to instrumentalism, an individual will cooperate with the police when the expected benefits of doing so outweigh the expected costs. Put another way, people would cooperate with the police if they both thought that the risk of a terrorist act was sufficiently high and that the police were effective in preventing this threat. The second was “neo-Durkheimian,” an approach based on the French sociologist’s notions of societal integrity. Under this approach, an individual would cooperate if she believed that the police were motivated by shared fundamental values—that is, if she identified morally with the police. Unlike instrumentalism, this approach focuses less on the effectiveness of the police but rather on the law’s expressive function in promoting the values necessary for social cohesion. The last mechanism was procedural justice, or a belief that the police are a legitimate authority. According to the procedural justice approach, an individual would cooperate if she sensed that policing tactics were fairly formulated and implemented. This approach focuses on factors such as whether the community was given an opportunity to participate in policymaking, whether officials exercise authority evenhandedly and consistently, and whether police interactions are conducted with dignity and respect.

Professor Huq’s study found that procedural justice was by far the strongest predictor of cooperation between the police and British Muslims. While this finding is consistent with much of the previous work in the field, there may be reasons to believe the other mechanisms play a larger role in producing cooperation than the survey revealed, as was discussed during the Q&A session following Professor Huq’s talk. For instance, respondents may have been reluctant to admit that they are principally motivated by purely rational considerations, and instead found the notions of fairness embedded in procedural justice a more attractive explanation for their behavior. On the other hand, the degree to which moral identification can yield cooperation may vary from community to community based on factors such as the ethnic composition of the police and the community, or shifts from large urban environments to smaller, more rural areas.

Nevertheless, Professor Huq’s study provides strong empirical evidence that procedural justice is highly correlated with community cooperation in counter-terrorism efforts. This suggests that government-community engagement and consultation is likely to yield the most successful policing strategies, though, as Britain’s unsuccessful attempt community engagement in the wake of the July, 2005, bombings shows, it is important that these efforts be viewed as earnest and not “shallow spin.”

One surprising result of Professor Huq’s study is that there was a separation between the reported significance of procedural justice and legitimacy, a finding at odds with previous studies of cooperation mechanisms. This may suggest that, even if they distance themselves from the workings of government, British Muslims are nonetheless willing to cooperate with the police if they perceive them as acting fairly. Additionally, a community’s belief that it is being specifically targeted for policing may have a corrosive effect on cooperation. However, group-based discrimination seems to have the largest effect on individuals who otherwise feel they are accepted members of the larger society. That is, an individual who identifies with the larger society across multiple dimensions is more likely to be offended by policing tactics that reduce that individual’s identity to a single factor. These two results point to important topics for further research.

Student Blogger - Public Law & Legal Theory Workshop: Traci Burch and The Neighborhood Effects of Incarceration

I spent this Thanksgiving with my family in Charlotte, North Carolina. My sister recently bought her first home in one of those quaint communities where the houses coordinate colors, and the neighbors all wave hello. When she first moved there, she was warned several times to be careful and always lock her doors when driving on the nearby South Boulevard. But to any seasoned Hyde Park resident, perceiving danger on a well-lit road with a prominent Pier 1 Imports is practically preposterous.

Putting South Boulevard aside, however, Charlotte's neighborhoods vary significantly in safety levels, police presence and incarceration rates. For Traci Burch, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, Charlotte presented the perfect grounds for research. Burch presented her findings in her paper, The Neighborhood Effects of Incarceration on Individual Perceptions of Discrimination and Political Efficacy, at the Public Law & Legal Theory Workshop on November 23, 2010.

The Effects of Incarceration in Neighborhoods

What is the political effect of imprisoning one percent of the national adult population? According to Burch, the effect is more significant than the national statistics indicate. The incarceration rate is not spread out geographically or uniformly. Instead, incidents of adult imprisonment are concentrated in specific neighborhoods, often among racial groups. As past research has shown, interactions with the government, or the criminal justice system, influence an individual's political attitudes; and incarceration usually instills a negative attitude. However, Burch posits a new question: what is the effect on political attitudes in the neighborhoods with high incarceration rates, even among people who were not themselves incarcerated?

Burch focuses on perceptions of discrimination and political efficacy in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg metro area. Burch compared survey data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates of 1% and 2%. The model controlled for age, ideology, education, poverty, crime, vacancy, and unemployment rates. Her findings demonstrate that neighborhood residents with higher imprisonment rates perceive more discrimination and feel less politically efficacious than people in neighborhoods with lower rates.

Further, Burch theorizes why government action reshapes attitudes in this way, building feelings of discrimination and deters voter turnout. In high incarceration neighborhoods, Burch explains, residents acquire political attitudes through cultural transmission and/or direct observation.

Cultural transmission is described as an individual's ability to share experiences, opinions and attitudes within a community. Essentially, these neighborhoods assimilate the attitudes of those that have been arrested.  In addition, a resident is more likely to directly observe another's negative experience with the government if the rate of police incidents is higher.  Accordingly, the rate of incarceration in a neighborhood is highly correlated with negative attitudes toward the criminal justice system, and by extension the government.

The government's antagonistic presence in these neighborhoods negatively affects the residents' perceived political efficacy. Political efficacy can be separated into two categories: (1) internal - an individual's perceived ability to affect political outcomes, and (2) external - the perceived responsiveness of political institutions.

Burch theorizes that attitudes of internal inefficacy sprout from the proximity to convicts and ex-convicts harboring feelings of discrimination, stigma and political weakness. Similarly, the negative external political attitudes are explained by unresponsiveness in interactions with welfare agencies or other government institutions. These interactions are pervasive in higher-incarceration neighborhoods, and the feelings spread through cultural transmission or direct observation.

Lastly, Burch describes how attitudes and perceived political efficacy affect voter turnout. As might be expected, voter turnout is lower in neighborhoods with feelings of low political efficacy. However, studies show that perceptions of discrimination increase group consciousness. This mixture raises the likelihood that high incarceration neighborhoods will resort to unconventional political avenues, such as protest or separatist movements. Linking political attitudes with heightened punishment in these neighborhoods improves our understanding of political behavior.

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During the workshop, alternative explanations were discussed. There may be other material reasons why political participation is low in these neighborhoods: Voting is much more costly for low-income people who do not have transportation or cannot easily take time off from work. However, Burch pointed out that her analysis controls for the economic condition of the individual respondent and their neighborhood, so these issues should not bias the results of the study.

Another point was made that high incarceration rates are not necessarily representative of a high police presence. Burch assured that the police incident reports used in the data were a good indicator of police presence, because they account for all police incidents, not just incarceration.

In the 2008 election, voter turnout was greater in three high incarceration neighborhoods with historically low voter turnout. Burch pointed out the likely explanation was the Obama campaign's ability to incite feelings of change, hope and political efficacy.