For years, Tom Tyler’s construal of procedural justice has been offered as a cornerstone of police reform under the logic that it will breed descriptive legitimacy, and in doing so enhance voluntary compliance with police instructions and decisions. While not rejecting this logic, the argument here dismisses it as incidental to the reform project of grounding democratic policing in a normative commitment to impartially produce practical substantive justice. In this regard, Tyler’s characterization of his version of police procedural justice as being entirely psychological leave it unable to perform this project’s crucial normative work. It also leaves its adherents open the worry that it can be used as a persuasive tool to pursue unjust ends unless one incorporates the normative commitments that Tyler explicitly eschews as a feature of his model of procedural justice. As an alternative, the argument here considers models of procedural justice taken from jurisprudence that ground the law’s normative imprimatur to impose coercive judgments. It concludes by rejecting the primacy of Tylerian procedural justice for a normative conception that tracks and closely aligns with the pursuit of substantive justice and normative legitimacy.

This chapter explores the value of and bases for police legitimacy. In doing so, it distinguishes between descriptive (or perceived, popular) legitimacy, and normative legitimacy, ultimately arguing that the latter is the natural ground of democratic policing and the more critical of the two, given policing’s commitment to practical, substantive justice. One of the principal hazards of descriptive legitimacy is its ability to yield a popular perception of policing’s legitimate authority that can sanction populist sentiments, ones that do not necessarily protect minority rights or honor a commitment to pluralism. Legitimacy is critical in the police pursuit of cooperation, especially in times of epistemic uncertainty, and the argument here is that the careful pursuit of substantive justice that conforms to the requirements of normative legitimacy will yield descriptive legitimacy across a substantial part of the community, and especially among its more marginalized or vulnerable members.