Fear of the police, procedural justice and the fragility of legitimacy in Chile and Brazil

Procedural justice theory has rarely placed fear of the police at the centre of the legitimacy process. In Chile and São Paulo, Brazil, coercive policing and fear of the police are prominent features of police–citizen relations. Procedural justice signals recognition and inclusion, and in contexts where police coercion is common, fear is likely to shape how those signals are read. We develop a process-based account in which fear sits upstream of the fairness and effectiveness judgements through which legitimacy is formed and test it against survey data from Chile (n = 5,361) and São Paulo (n = 1,806). Structural equation models show that perceived coercive policing and observation of or exposure to police violence are associated with higher fear; fear is associated with lower procedural justice; and these appraisals are associated with weaker legitimacy – particularly, normative alignment. We make the case for incorporating fear of the police into the social-psychological analysis of legitimacy perceptions in Latin American contexts and outline how intergroup emotions theory can guide the next stage of that work.