ABSTRACT
This chapter presents that an extended plea for extending the scope of crime prevention to embrace strategies and tactics that are designed to strengthen people’s normative commitment to the rule of law – and therefore ‘demotivate’ offending behaviour. It outlines what it means by compliance theory and gives some idea of the range of theories that examine the roots of normative compliance. The chapter describes in rather more detail a particular compliance theory that in our view offers much promise to policing. It focuses on the role of fairness in building trust in justice and institutional legitimacy and presents some findings from the 2010 European Social Survey which tests the main hypotheses of procedural justice theory across 27 European countries. The chapter considers some ethical and practical issues that need to be addressed in institutionalising procedural justice principles in policing.
