Legitimacy Training for Counter Terrorism Officers: Lessons from a Cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial

In the next two chapters, the theoretical relationship between training on procedural justice, self-legitimacy, and audience legitimacy as outcomes is explored. The degree to which police officers maintain higher levels of self-legitimacy is hypothesised to affect how they conduct themselves, which, in turn, translates into improved audience legitimacy. A test is conducted to evaluate the effect of a bespoke training package aimed at stimulating an officer’s inner conversations and promoting their sense of self or self-legitimacy as well as audience legitimacy scores. Frontline police officers working within counterterrorism settings were randomly assigned to training or control conditions within a large-scale cluster-randomised controlled trial. The results suggest differing results in terms of both measures. The findings confirm that the training has no statistically significant effects on the degree to which officers retain the belief in their moral right to be bestowed with the powers vested in them to discharge the performance of their duties effectively. However, the training leads to interactions that suspects perceive as more legitimate. A conclusion can be drawn that, through training, interactions between police officers and members of the public are perceived as fairer. Scholars and practitioners interested in audience legitimacy should, therefore, concentrate on legitimacy training in an attempt to improve policing. The test of the effects associated with the delivery of a short bespoke legitimacy training programme on officer self-legitimacy was the first of its kind. Findings from the analysis of two waves of surveys—one immediately after the training (84% response rate) and one twelve months afterwards (63% response rate)—suggest inconsistent effects across the various dimensions that constitute the model of self-legitimacy frequently referred to within the available literature. Many training effects also appear to suffer fade-out or decay.