Abstract:
Prior research showed that when collective efficacy is strong, it mediates the effects of
concentrated disadvantage, and neighborhoods experience less crime. An untested theory
about legitimacy suggests that legal institutions may be a catalyst for neighborhoods to
improve collective efficacy. Legitimacy theory claims that when societies grant legal
institutions legitimacy, people internalize rules and laws upheld by legal institutions,
socialize others to those rules and laws, and adhere to the formal authority of legal
institutions, which reduces crime. This dissertation is interested in the process by which
people socialize others to rules and laws in the form of collective efficacy, examining
whether views about police behaviors are related to legal institution legitimacy and
collective efficacy. I theorized that police can improve legal institution legitimacy by
delivering high quality services and minimizing misconduct, thus strengthening collective
efficacy in neighborhoods and reducing crime and disorder. Conducting the research in
Trinidad and Tobago extends the boundaries of prior research on collective efficacy and
legitimacy beyond the United States, Britain, and other developed nations, into a
developing nation that is wrestling with difficult challenges, including widespread
disadvantage, inadequate infrastructure, acute violence, corruption, and cynicism and
distrust among its people. Trinidad’s circumstances provided the opportunity to examine
the linkages between police misbehavior and legal institutions and community outcomes
in an environment fraught with challenges for police and neighborhoods to overcome.
Additionally, in this context, I studied the linkages between delivering higher quality
services and legal institution legitimacy, collective efficacy, and crime and disorder, even
when the overall level of services is constrained to be low. I found that police behavior
in Trinidad and Tobago has important consequences for legal institution legitimacy and
for neighborhood outcomes. The results support that police may contribute to and utilize
neighborhood collective efficacy as a lever to reduce crime and disorder problems. The
results, however, do not (in general) support that the mechanism through which police
accomplish this is legal institution legitimacy. The conclusions uphold the strong
relationship between collective efficacy and crime and disorder, but leave in doubt
whether legal institution legitimacy provides a pathway for increasing collective efficacy.
