Abstract
This article seeks to make the case for the value of police using fair and considerate processes with victims of crime to enhance perceptions of the legitimacy of police and the willingness of former victims to subsequently report victimization to the police. To support this case results of older rounds of the International Crime Victims Surveys (ICVS) are revisited from a procedural justice perspective. Considering the positive findings of national experiments with improved services for victims and the potential to reach out to large segments of the general public through improved policies regarding reporting crime victims, the conclusion is drawn that procedural justice for victims should be at the center of programs to strengthen the legitimacy of police forces in the European Union.
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Notes
- 1.
The Euro-Justis questionnaire includes one question asking whether respondents have in the course of the last 5 years been victimized by either a burglary or an assault. This catch all item does not meet the well-established standards of a victimization survey. Since victims are not asked whether they have reported the incident to the police, the results cannot be reliably used to examine the impact of police treatment of victims on their attitudes towards the police.
- 2.
Questions about the satisfaction of victims with their treatment by the police are the most commonly used measures in research to test Tyler’s theory among crime victims (Laxminarayan et al., 2013).
- 3.
Building on these ICVS results, the hypothesis can be formulated that victims will hold less favorable opinions of the police than non-victims in Eastern and Southern European countries because most of those who have reported to the police are likely to be dissatisfied with their treatment. In countries in North Western Europe these differences might be smaller, or altogether absent, because negative and positive experiences with the police will be more equally divided and offset each other in their diverging impact on opinions. As said, the lack of more and better questions on victimization and reporting of victims precludes a more pertinent examination of these relationships using the Euro-Justis dataset.
- 4.
Nation-specific crime victim surveys in England/Wales and the Netherlands, using much larger samples, have also registered declines in satisfaction since 1995 (Allen, 2006; Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2006). In an overview of 25 years of the British Crime Survey Janson (2006: pp. 23) writes: “The BCS also asks victims how satisfied they were with the police. Victims’ satisfaction with the way the police dealt with the matter decreased between 1994 and 2000, but has remained stable since.” The Dutch victim satisfaction rate has also failed to move up after its drop around 2000. The level of satisfaction has remained below 60 % ever since (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2012).
- 5.
Of the victims reporting a household burglary in Estonia only 31 % were satisfied with their treatment by the police.
- 6.
A factor behind the drop in satisfaction may the gradual increase of victims reporting by phone or via Internet. There is some evidence that in England/Wales victims who have no face-to-face contacts with the police are somewhat less satisfied (Allen, 2006).
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van Dijk, J. (2015). Procedural Justice for Victims in an International Perspective. In: Meško, G., Tankebe, J. (eds) Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09813-5_3
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