Procedural Justice: The Police Leader’s Guide to Fair Encounters

A police encounter can be lawful, proportionate and operationally successful while still leaving the person convinced that the police treated them unfairly. Procedural justice explains why the process used to exercise police authority can affect legitimacy even when the outcome is lawful.

People judge police authority partly through the quality of the process used against them, not only through whether they got the outcome they wanted. The College of Policing places procedural justice explicitly within its public-confidence guidance and identifies four recurring elements: voice, neutrality, dignity and respect, and trustworthy motives. College of Policing, 22 April 2025.

For police leaders, the attraction is obvious. None of those elements requires officers to surrender lawful powers. An officer can arrest, search, refuse entry, issue a notice or use force where necessary while still listening, explaining, making a neutral decision and treating the person with dignity.

The evidence supports making that distinction part of ordinary policing. It does not support turning procedural justice into a promise that politeness automatically creates compliance or that one training course will repair public trust.

Procedural justice is not about using less authority. It is about making the exercise of authority fair, intelligible and respectful.

What are the four pillars of procedural justice?

The College of Policing groups procedural justice around four recurring elements: voice, neutrality, dignity and respect, and trustworthy motives. For operational use, these can be treated as four observable features of an encounter. They do not alter the legal threshold for exercising a police power. They shape how the decision is reached, explained and experienced. College of Policing, 22 April 2025.

Voice means giving the person a meaningful opportunity to explain their position. It does not mean handing them control of the decision.

Neutrality means showing that the decision rests on relevant facts, law and consistent criteria rather than prejudice, irritation or convenience.

Respect means protecting dignity even where the person is suspected of wrongdoing or is being compelled to do something.

Trustworthy motives means making it apparent that the officer is acting for a legitimate policing purpose rather than to dominate, punish informally or make life easier for themselves.

The poster is designed as a briefing and training aid rather than a substitute for the underlying evidence. The four headings are useful because they turn a broad idea about legitimacy into behaviours that supervisors can observe in body-worn video, custody interactions, stop and search and other high-impact encounters.

The College’s 2025 evidence synthesis says procedural justice is strongly associated with higher police legitimacy and that perceptions of fairness tend to have a greater effect on legitimacy than perceptions of police effectiveness. College of Policing.

That finding should be read correctly. Much of this literature is observational. People who experience the police as fair are more likely to regard them as legitimate; that does not mean every observed association is a clean causal estimate of what a particular training programme will do.

Randomised trials show that officer behaviour can change

The strongest practical question is whether procedural justice can be taught in a way that changes what officers actually do.

One useful answer comes from a multicity randomised trial published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. Researchers selected 120 residential crime hot spots across Tucson, Cambridge in Massachusetts and Houston. Hot spots were randomly assigned to procedural-justice or standard policing conditions, and 28 officers were randomly assigned to the two conditions. Officers in the procedural-justice group received an intensive five-day training course focused on voice, neutrality, respect and trustworthy motives. Weisburd and colleagues, PNAS, 2022.

The researchers observed more procedurally just behaviour and less disrespectful treatment in the treatment condition. Residents also reported less police harassment and violence, and the treatment hot spots recorded lower crime than the comparison hot spots during the experiment. Weisburd et al., 2022.

This is unusually strong evidence because the intervention and locations were randomised. It is still one intervention in three US cities. The correct conclusion is that intensive procedural-justice training can change police behaviour and can produce wider benefits under some conditions. It is not that a shorter package, different supervisory culture or different policing context must produce the same result.

The Queensland Community Engagement Trial provides another randomised test. Police conducting random breath tests used a scripted encounter designed around the four elements of procedural justice. The study found improvements in specific evaluations of the encounter and examined whether those changes transferred into broader views of police legitimacy. Mazerolle and colleagues, Criminology, 2013.

Together these studies support an operational proposition: procedural justice is not merely a public-relations theory. Police behaviour can be deliberately changed and the public notices the difference.

The evidence is weaker when the claim becomes “fairness reduces crime”

A common chain in the literature runs like this: fair treatment increases legitimacy; legitimacy increases willingness to cooperate and obey the law; therefore procedural justice reduces crime.

Each link is plausible and supported to different degrees. The complete causal chain is less certain.

The College of Policing’s review of what stops people offending says there is a large body of research linking procedural justice, legitimacy and public compliance, but evidence on interventions that reduce offending through increased police legitimacy is much more limited. College of Policing — What stops people offending?.

Police leaders should therefore avoid presenting procedural justice to officers as a guaranteed crime-reduction tactic. The stronger case is that it improves the quality and legitimacy of police authority; some trials also show crime benefits, but those outcomes should be measured rather than assumed.

This makes implementation more credible. Officers do not need to believe that every respectful explanation will make a hostile person compliant. They need to understand that how they exercise a power affects the legitimacy cost of the encounter, including among people who still dislike the outcome.

Stop and search is where the principle becomes visible

Stop and search is an obvious test because the power is intrusive, highly visible and often exercised against people who will not be arrested afterwards.

The College’s stop-and-search APP explicitly links appropriate use of the power with procedural justice. It advises officers to make impartial decisions, explain those decisions, allow people to tell their side, demonstrate trustworthy motives and treat people with dignity. College of Policing — Stop and search.

A Dorset Police study published by the College in 2024 reviewed 140 randomly selected body-worn-video encounters from 2021 using a procedural-justice scoring method. Officers scored highly overall, but the study found variation across the four elements and lower scores for trustworthy motives and neutrality than for dignity and respect. The author is clear that the study is local and does not establish national performance. College of Policing, 29 November 2024.

The practical lesson is that legality and procedural justice are different audit questions. A body-worn-video reviewer can conclude that the grounds were lawful while also finding that the officer failed to explain them properly or did not give the person a meaningful chance to speak.

For leadership, that creates an actionable quality measure. Instead of reviewing only whether officers complied with the legal process, supervisors can ask how the power was exercised.

The same standard applies in custody and use of force

Custody is another setting where the officer holds overwhelming formal authority and the detainee has limited control over the outcome.

A Cambridgeshire study published by the College in 2023 examined interactions between custody sergeants and detainees at three custody suites. It found differences between the procedural-justice dimensions and raised the possibility of using structured auditing of custody interactions. The study was small and the author cautioned against generalising its results. College of Policing, 28 May 2023.

Use of force presents the same underlying issue. Procedural justice cannot make an unnecessary use of force legitimate. But where force is lawful and necessary, explanation, neutrality and respect before and after the event can still affect how the encounter is understood.

The discipline is therefore most valuable where officers have the greatest power and the public has the least choice.

Leaders cannot demand external fairness while practising internal unfairness

Procedural justice also runs inside police organisations.

Ben Bradford and Paul Quinton studied officers in an English constabulary and found that officers’ identification with their organisation was strongly associated with their perceptions of procedural justice from senior management. Organisational identification was, in turn, the strongest predictor of officers’ confidence in their own legitimate authority. Greater self-legitimacy was linked with stronger support for democratic modes of policing. Bradford and Quinton, 2014.

A later literature has examined whether internal procedural justice translates into greater commitment to procedural justice with the public. A recent study in Policing similarly reported associations between supportive, respectful supervision and officers’ commitment to external procedural justice, while examining potential mediating mechanisms such as self-efficacy and wellbeing. Policing, 2024.

The causal pathways are still being studied, so leaders should avoid the slogan that “fair managers automatically create fair officers”. The organisational implication is nevertheless difficult to ignore. A force that trains constables to give voice, explain decisions and act neutrally while running opaque promotion, posting or misconduct processes is teaching two different models of legitimate authority.

What implementation should look like

A one-off classroom input is the weakest version of procedural-justice implementation.

The evidence suggests something more concrete:

• teach the four behaviours using realistic operational scenarios;
• observe them in body-worn video and live supervision;
• give feedback on the quality of the interaction, not only its legality;
• concentrate auditing on high-impact powers such as stop and search, custody and force;
• apply the same principles to internal leadership decisions;
• measure whether behaviour changed after training.

Checklists and scripts can help in some circumstances. The College says training can change officer behaviour and that scripts or checklists can also be effective when used appropriately. College of Policing, 2025.

The objective is not scripted politeness. It is a repeatable professional standard for exercising authority.

Fair process is part of operational competence

Procedural justice is sometimes presented as the softer alternative to assertive policing. The evidence points in the opposite direction. It is a way of using police powers while reducing the unnecessary legitimacy cost attached to them.

That is why the strongest leadership question is not whether a force “believes in procedural justice”. It is whether officers are routinely expected, observed and supervised to give people voice, make neutral decisions, show respect and demonstrate trustworthy motives — particularly during encounters where the person has the least power.

Forces already inspect legality, timeliness and outcome. Procedural justice adds another question: was the authority exercised in a way that a reasonable person could recognise as fair?

That gives supervisors something concrete to observe, coach and audit rather than another statement of values.

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Sources and further reading

• College of Policing — What works: policing with procedural and distributive justice, 22 April 2025
• Weisburd et al. — Reforming the police through procedural justice training: a multicity randomized trial at crime hot spots, PNAS, 2022
• Mazerolle et al. — Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police Legitimacy, 2013
• College of Policing — What stops people offending?
• College of Policing — Procedural justice in stop and search, 29 November 2024
• Bradford and Quinton — Self-legitimacy, Police Culture and Support for Democratic Policing in an English Constabulary, 2014