Legal Cynicism, Collective Arrest Analysis

Peoples attitudes towards the police and the law play an important role on how they obey the laws and participate in informal social control. Those who see police as unresponsive, or unhelpful lead to more crimes committed in that area, whereas a more positive outlook on the law enforcement; believing police will do their jobs and help others and solve problems, protecting the community will result in less crimes in the area. Therefore, “more crime will occur in neighborhoods characterized by legal cynicism.” (Kirk and Matsuda, 2011) For example, urban areas that alienate themselves from the legal system develop a “code of the street”, meaning more crimes will go unnoticed or unpunished because of the lack of reporting and police duty in that

First, I will describe legal cynicism and crime rates, then I will connect legal cynicism and implicate it to social control and social order. With this prior information learned from class and from the “Legal Cynicism, Collective Efficacy, and the Ecology of Arrest” article, I will lastly suggest useful ways to address legal cynicism. Sociologist David S. Kirk and criminologist Mauri Matsuda define the concept legal cynicism as: “a cultural frame in which the law and the agents of its enforcement are viewed as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety.” Legal cynicism is more cultural because of the individual’s perceptions of the law, which forms the thoughts of neighborhoods, rather than an individual because it is structured from the conditions of the neighborhoods interactions with each other, and interactions with the police

Social control exists to counter disorder. It identifies the ways groups coordinate and cooperate and show how people react to deviance. Social control is inversely related to the proportion of a minority population in a geographic area, therefore crime is lower in minority neighborhoods. A reasoning may be that people are afraid of the police because they always see the negative aspects of arrests, or they may be afraid of the violent person harassing them because they found out they called for police service to get them arrested, etc. This can relate to a stigma, these are our ideas of how we want others to see us, so we use our specific roles to communicate that every day. Police officers want others to see them as a protector, also as an intimidation factor so others will obey the