Trust in the police and police legitimacy through the eyes of teenagers

Earlier sweeps of the International Self Report Delinquency Survey (ISRD) made no attempt to cover teenagers’ attitudes towards criminal justice institutions. ISRD3 goes a little way to filling this gap by including a short suite of questions on trust in the police and perceptions of police legitimacy, that sets out to see if well-established insights into adults’ attitudes, built on procedural justice theory, also hold true for teenagers. Results are presented in this chapter. To anticipate our conclusions, the results very largely reflect those that have emerged internationally for adult samples: that trust in procedural justice is a precondition for legitimacy, reducing preparedness to break the law, and that the quality of teenagers’ experience of the police is a clear determinant of their trust in the police.