ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a necessary distinction between the police and the law and analyses the determinants of why an enforcing authority (i.e. police) is given a right to dictate behaviour outside of the law (by force and illegal means). Certain groups of citizens believe that when police behave violently or outside the bounds of the law, they are within their rightful limits. Based on a secondary analysis of a 2014 TESEV survey in Turkey, the chapter seeks to determine who makes up such groups and why they hold these attitudes, and highlights the importance of politics and societal level cleavages. A series of two additional classic attitudes towards police indexes were built, and correlated with the measure of support for police deviance. Ethnic identity has an additional effect on attitudes towards police. In 2013, Behavioural economist Dan Kahan has studied whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces partisan beliefs.
