The role of organisational justice and community policing values in the model of external procedural justice in Croatia

This study tests the link between internal procedural justice (fair treatment of police officers by supervisors) and external procedural justice (fair treatment of citizens by police officers), proposed by Van Craen and previously tested only in a few Western democracies and Asian countries. This paper relies on a survey of police officers from Croatia, an East-European country in transition, and expands the model by incorporating the potential effect of the police officers' support for community policing on the fair treatment of citizens. Our model, based on the data from a 2017 survey of 638 Croatian police officers, demonstrated that the latent variable internal procedural justice had a modest, positive association with trust in the public, while the latent variable of community policing values did not have a significant association with trust in the public. The antecedent variable community policing values serves as the model's strongest predictor of external procedural justice.