Dr Justice Tankebe (Lecturer at THE University of Cambridge, UK and Senior Fellow at the Africa Institute of Crime, Policy and Governance Research) delivered the 2017 Dae Chang lecture at the School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University. The title of his talk was In their Own Eyes: An Examination of Police Self-Legitimacy.
Dr Tankebe discussed the centrality of self-legitimacy in Max Weber’s comparative study of legitimation. The lecture also focused on the nature of self-legitimacy, the factors that sustain it and how self-legitimacy matters for understanding police ethical behaviour and moral commitments to citizens. Data presented showed supervisor and peer recognition were key predictors of frontline police officers’ self-legitimacy. Self-legitimacy, in turn, was shown to influence officers’ commitments to fair treatment of citizens.