There is an emerging body of scholarship that suggests that procedural justice plays a significant role in the public’s perception of police legitimacy. Contemporary community standards have increasingly demanded that police departments make fairness one of their highest priorities; however, the concept of procedural justice is more than just treating people with fairness. The concept draws specifically on four defined elements of community-police interactions: (1) community members want to be treated with respect (respect); (2) the public wants to be able to voice their concerns (voice); (3) people want police to act as a neutral third party (neutrality); and (4) the public expects police motives to be trustworthy (trustworthiness).¹ While the concept of procedural justice has been explored and evaluated in practice, only one study has evaluated the effectiveness of formal classroom procedural justice training.²
This article gives an overview of the existing literature pertaining to procedural justice and discusses the procedural justice training that took place in Norfolk, Virginia, as part of a larger National Institute of Justice (NIJ) research project, followed by an evaluation of the Norfolk training’s short-term and long-term effects. Action items will also be discussed.³