Winning hearts and minds in counterterrorism through community policing and procedural justice: Evidence from Turkey

Policing terrorism in diverse communities is a major challenge for law enforcement in countries facing a significant, omnipresent, and continuous threat from domestic terrorism. Community policing, a policing innovation that has dominated policing for a few decades in democracies around the world, has been heralded as a primary tool for the police in their counterterrorism role as it relates to the policing of diverse communities. Community policing, when applied to counterterrorism, is expected to increase perceptions of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police among the minority communities that attract much police attention because of the suspicion that they are harboring terrorists. This study, using secondary data and employing a cross section non-experimental design, provides a test of these hypotheses through an impact assessment of various community policing interventions of the Turkish National Police with the local Kurdish juveniles in the province of Sirnak, where the police citizen relations are shaped predominantly by the counterterrorism role of the police. Previous research on police legitimacy and willingness to cooperate with the police links the outcomes of legitimacy and cooperation to the perceptions of procedural justice, that is, the perceptions that the police demonstrate fairness in making decisions (i.e., listening to people before making decisions) and their treatment of the individuals they come into contact with (i.e., showing respect and treating with dignity). This theory, which has enjoyed strong empirical support in a general crime context, has recently been extended to the counterterrorism context in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In addition to evaluating the impact of community policing interventions on perceived legitimacy and the willingness to cooperate, this study tests whether procedural justice is related to these outcomes in the counterterrorism context of Turkey. Finally, this study investigates the nexus between community policing and procedural justice and tests whether procedural justice mediates the effects of community policing on the outcomes of perceived legitimacy and the willingness to cooperate. The results suggest that community policing initiatives have a robust significant positive effect on willingness to cooperate with the police and that perceived procedural fairness is a key antecedent to perceived police legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. In addition, the results provide partial support for the hypothesis that procedural justice mediates the effects of community policing interventions on perceived legitimacy and the willingness to cooperate.