Normative, expressive, and personal factors associated with cooperation with police: Findings from a longitudinal cohort study

Purpose

While there has been extensive research on the normative, instrumental, and social explanations for cooperation with police, fewer studies have examined how personal, social-cognitive characteristics might influence willingness to cooperate. This paper integrates models of cooperation with the social information processing framework to understand when individuals are more willing to cooperate with the police.

Methods

We use two waves of data from the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, an ongoing longitudinal study of an ethnically diverse sample of young people from Zurich, Switzerland.

Results

The results show that, aside from perceptions of police legitimacy, moral neutralization and empathy were directly associated with willingness to cooperate. Police legitimacy moderated the relationship between moral neutralization and cooperation, however this effect was not robust across models. In addition, we found that those who have engaged in serious criminal behavior were less likely to cooperate.

Conclusions

We argue that our findings demonstrate the need for cooperation with police research to adopt a decision-making framework in explaining the decision to indirectly intervene and cooperate. Namely, individuals must first recognize and acknowledge the harm or illegal behavior done when deciding to take action to cooperate with the police.