Police misconduct hearings as legitimacy dialogues

Police misconduct and responses to it threaten the police's legitimacy with both the public and its own officers. Drawing on Bottoms and Tankebe's notion of a legitimacy dialogue, I examine how London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) uses public gross misconduct hearings to engage both its own officers and the public. I use ethnographic observations of these hearings to conceptualise them as incomplete legitimacy dialogues. The hearings speak to multiple, concentric audiences to whom the police must appear as a legitimate powerholder: their own officers and the public. Within the public, the police address both a specific public - those involved in the instant complaint - and the general public more broadly. I argue these dialogues are incomplete. While the police service uses procedural justice principles in disciplining its officers, the hearing process often falls short with regard to distributive justice. Further, while the hearings do provide interactional justice for members of the public who attend them, the circumscribed role for the public in the actual hearing process and the quasi-judicial, adversarial nature of the process reduces its efficacy at improving public legitimacy. The hearing process relies on a penal populist notion of what the public wants regarding police misconduct but elides any role for actual public input. When analysed through this lens, the hearings point to other potential ways that the misconduct process might also build legitimacy and public trust in the police.