Police legitimacy and digital technologies: Integrating procedural justice theorizing,dialogic legitimacy,and police facial recognition technology adoption

Abstract

Police legitimacy is conceived as constantly being reconstituted through people’s interactions with police. Previous research on procedural justice and legitimacy has mostly focused on in-person police-community interaction. However, the increasing use of digital technologies by police has meant that more policing is done online and without face-to-face interaction with the public. Using facial recognition technology as an exemplar, this paper argues that adopting technologies using the pillars of procedural justice improves police legitimacy. Moreover, we make the case that the adoption of technologies is an act of dialogic legitimacy where police seek responses/consent from communities to guide further technology adoption.

Keywords

procedural justice police legitimacy facial recognition digital technologies public-police interactions

Introduction

Many theorists have attempted to explain why people obey laws. One of the most popularly adopted theories by law enforcement and public safety agencies is deterrence: the idea that people obey laws due to fear of punishment (Miceli et al., 2022). This focus on deterrence leaves little room to question the rightness of the law and the institutions that protect it (Tankebe, (2013); Tyler’s 1990 book tackles the question of ‘why do people obey the law’ through a different lens, that of the legitimacy of legal and law enforcement institutions. His central argument is that people obey the law because they believe in it and its enforcers are perceived as legitimate (Tyler, 1990). Since then, research and theorizing on legitimacy have continued to evolve to provide a dynamic perspective on the institution of policing, its role within society, and how it aims to claim and sustain power.

In this article, we add to existing theorizing on legitimacy by examining police use of digital technologies, and using facial recognition technology as an exemplar, through the lens of procedural justice and dialogic legitimacy theorizing. Police services are increasingly adopting a range of digital technologies such as body-worn cameras, automated surveillance systems, facial recognition, and online reporting portals in an effort to modernize operations and improve frontline services. These developments illustrate that technology is not merely changing the tasks police perform, but also reshaping the scale, speed, and scope of their authority and enforcement activities. These advancements are not only technical, as they also influence the nature of police–community interactions and the public’s experience with, and perception of, police. As digital technologies become more embedded in everyday police practice, it is critical to better understand how these changes might affect public trust, legitimacy, and perceptions of procedural fairness.

To set the stage for our argument, we first examine the interconnections between authority, power, legitimacy, and policing, touching briefly on the various ways legitimacy has been conceived and why legitimacy matters. Next, we make the case that procedural justice theorizing provides a pathway to police legitimacy. We build on these ideas by applying dialogical legitimacy and procedural justice theorizing to the increasing use of digital technologies by police and discuss the implications of this on police legitimacy using facial recognition technology (FRT) as an exemplar. We argue that the acceptance and integration of new policing technologies, especially those that have higher disruptive impacts on personal privacy like FRT, are fundamentally dependent on a community’s pre-existing perception of its police service’s legitimacy. This relationship suggests a critical feedback loop: where trust is low, the introduction of new technologies is likely to be met with skepticism and resistance, potentially exacerbating existing tensions. Conversely, we contend that when technologies are implemented through a procedurally just framework, prioritizing transparency, fairness, and voice, it possesses the potential not only to be accepted but to actively enhance police legitimacy. Ultimately, public trust in the police determines whether new technologies are accepted, and how these technologies are then used will, in turn, influence the level of public trust. Essentially, we make the case that the adoption of technologies is an act of dialogic legitimacy where police seek responses/consent from communities to guide further technology adoption.

Authority, power, legitimacy and policing

To better understand the relationship between trust in police and their technology adoption, we trace the conceptual evolution of legitimacy, beginning with some of its foundational roots and discussions of why people obey the law. Max Weber’s concept of legal-rational authority suggests people obey laws when they believe in the legitimacy of enacted rules and those enforcing them. Legal-rational authority is bound by the idea that people will obey authorities when they believe “in the legality of the enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands” (Weber, 1978 [1922]: 215). He frames the police as the “coercive arm of the state,” whose power to use force requires legitimation (Terpstra, 2011). Legitimacy, in Weber’s view, stems from legality, that is, people obey simply because they are “persuaded to obey” (Harkin, 2015: 598).

While Weber emphasized that authority is legitimate when it is legally sanctioned and exercised according to rules (focusing predominantly on the underlying belief systems that justify the rule), Beetham (1991) argued that this legality alone is insufficient for understanding public perceptions of legitimacy. Instead, he argues that legitimacy is a more complex phenomenon composed of three interlocking dimensions: legality, express consent, and justifiability.

Legality

The first dimension of Beetham’s model, legality, aligns closely with Weber’s rational-legal authority, requiring that police power is “acquired and exercised in accordance with established rules” (Beetham, 1991: 13). In this view, police are seen as legitimate when they act lawfully, morally, and in ways the public perceive as appropriate, not just because citizens comply with their authority. Legitimacy through legality demands that police follow the law, use their powers legally, and are “expected to follow due process” without bias or prejudice (Tankebe et al., 2014: 243). The importance of legality is often clearest when it fails, leading to illegitimacy (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). On a large systems level, this illegality is demonstrated when police services in the U.S. are forced to enter consent decrees. A consent decree is a court-enforced, federally-monitored agreement designed to reform a police department after a pattern of unconstitutional practices, misconduct, or corruption is found. These legal remedies are a formal admission of a systemic failure of legality (Chappell, 2017).

Consent

The second component required for the legitimacy of police, according to Beetham (1991), is consent. Beetham specifically notes that there must be evidence of consent “by the subordinate to the particular power relation” (Beetham, 1991: 15). In other words, police derive their authority from the individuals they govern, a notion reflected in how many police services present themselves to the public. For instance, the Minneapolis Police Department states on its website that it “gains [its] authority from the community” (City of Minneapolis, 2023). Despite frequent references to policing by consent, there is little critical examination of who grants this consent and whose voices police prioritize (O’Connor, 2008). For example, many Black communities in the U.S. do not consent to current policing practices, as they experience both over-policing and under-service. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to systemic racism and police brutality, amplifying the voices of Black communities (Feldman and Bassett, 2021; Ogunrotifa, 2023). Ultimately, ‘policing by consent’ often reflects the approval of individuals, groups, or institutions with enough power to influence police decision-making, rather than a truly inclusive or representative consensus.

Normative justifiability

The final component of legitimate power, the normative justifiability of power or shared values, refers to how the laws and rules that govern both police and citizens’ behaviour are justified. Beetham’s theorizing draws on Durkheimian ideas, emphasizing that legitimacy is fundamentally rooted in the shared values and beliefs between the police and the public. As Beetham states, “rules cannot justify themselves” (Tankebe et al., 2014: 243). Legitimacy exists when those in power (police) and those subjected to their power (citizens) recognize the accepted values. For police to be perceived as legitimate, they must enforce laws and act in accordance with the values of the dominant culture. This implies that police officers, as recognized authority figures, represent and reflect the community’s values, strengthening the belief that these values are important to preserve (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003).

Legitimacy: The social psychology perspective

While Beetham approached legitimacy from a political theory perspective, Lind and Tyler (1988) developed an understanding of procedural justice grounded in social psychology. Building on Thibaut and Walker’s (1978) work on the more objective aspects of procedural justice, Lind and Tyler (1988) emphasized that procedural justice is also subjective and shaped by individuals’ perceptions of fairness in interpersonal encounters. Initially, while not explicitly using the term legitimacy, Lind and Tyler (1988) noted through their Group Value Model (later expanded into the Procedural Justice Model) that people’s subjective perceptions of procedural justice impact how they perceive the group (e.g., institutions). Thus, people comply with authority not only because of the outcomes they receive (which a strict rational-legal model might imply) but also because of the fairness of the process used to reach those outcomes.

Legitimacy, then, from a social psychology perspective, emphasizes “the belief that authorities, institutions, and social arrangements are appropriate, proper, and just…[and that this belief] leads people to defer voluntarily to decisions, rules, and social arrangements” (Tyler, 2006: 376). Tyler (2006), building his social psychology perspective on legitimacy, drew on several works and a long history of legitimacy theorizing that we cannot fully cover here. However, to note some key ones, for example, Tyler’s work builds on French and Raven’s (1959: 148) examinations of social power and group dynamics, where they found that “the effectiveness of an attempt by a leader (or member) to influence another member of the group increases with increasing acceptance of the leader by the recipient.” Similarly, it builds on Kelman (1958), who notes the importance of considering whether people’s susceptibility to being influenced by authority is based on simple compliance (they do not necessarily agree, but believe showing they are agreeable to being influenced might confer favourable outcomes), identification (they want to show authority they agree to maintain good relations), or internalization (they agree because its rewarding and aligns with their values). Thus, people internalize the obligation to defer to authorities if they perceive them as legitimate (Tyler, 1990, 2006).

Applying this to police-citizen interactions, when authorities (the police) treat people with dignity, respect, and neutrality, it signals to the citizen that they are a respected member of the group or community (Meares et al., 2015). This fair treatment acts as an affirmation of the shared values Beetham and Durkheim emphasized, fostering trust and a stronger sense of identification with the authority. In Tyler’s (2006: 379) own assessment of the wealth of procedural justice literature completed within social psychology, he states “[a] core finding of that literature is that authorities and institutions are viewed as more legitimate and, therefore, their decisions and rules are more willingly accepted when they exercise their authority through procedures that people experience as being fair.” Further, Lind and Tyler demonstrate that perceived fairness in police conduct directly translates into voluntary public acceptance and compliance, thereby offering empirical support for Beetham’s call to ground authority in shared moral justification rather than mere rule-following.

While Beetham asks what makes power legitimate in principle and practice, operating at the system level to analyze institutions and rules against shared moral values, Tyler focuses on the individual level, examining how fair treatment shapes citizens’ subjective acceptance of authority, compliance, and cooperation. Despite these differences in scale, both stress that legitimacy is a socially constructed phenomenon central to stable governance, and both reject explanations of obedience grounded solely in coercion or self-interest. In this sense, Tyler’s focus on subjective perceptions corresponds strongly to Beetham’s notion of expressed consent and the need for justifiability. Tyler explicitly draws on Weber and Beetham’s view of legitimacy in his 2004 article ‘Enhancing Police Legitimacy’, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, to further refine his understanding of legitimacy.

The importance of police legitimacy

Now that we have outlined the key components that have been envisioned to make up police legitimacy, it is important to explore in more depth why police legitimacy matters. According to Sunshine and Tyler (2003), legitimacy matters for three main reasons: obedience and crime reduction, enhanced compliance and support, and collective social regulation and public safety. These are echoed by Mazerolle et al. (2014), who further break these concepts into 10 different independent reasons. However, for the sake of simplicity, this article focuses on the three larger umbrella reasons outlined by Sunshine and Tyler (2003).

First, if the public views the police as a legitimate power, they are more likely to voluntarily obey the law and subsequently crime will be reduced. This moves beyond deterrence theorizing, which believes that people comply with the law only due to fear of punishment. Instead, the perception of legitimacy promotes voluntary law obedience, compliance, and police cooperation. Legitimate power extends to include legal compliance when police are present and when they are not. For example, people mostly stop at a red light in the middle of the night, even with no traffic around. When police and the laws they enforce are seen as legitimate, “they are more likely to bring their behaviour in line with the laws that the police represent” (Mazerolle et al., 2014: 3). Legitimacy is part of a shared goal and identity where we as a society have mostly agreed on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour.

Second, police being viewed as legitimate means that citizens are more likely to comply with and support police demands and decisions. Legitimacy empowers the police and gives them “a wider range of discretion to perform their duties” (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003: 517). Thus, police are less likely to be challenged for their decision-making. This can include the use of surveillance technologies, which will be discussed in more depth below. For example, if police were truly seen as legitimate by the public, people would likely not feel the need to film police decision-making to ensure police are treating them fairly. Therefore, increased compliance of the public with police demands because they perceive the police as legitimate would mean that police and citizens are safer, as individuals are more likely to listen to police and police would use less force (Mazerolle et al., 2014).

Lastly, when people believe that the laws and those who enforce them are legitimate, theoretically, they will not only comply but also collaboratively contribute to social regulation (Mazerolle et al., 2014; Tyler and Fagan, 2008). Mazerolle et al. (2014) note that when police are seen as legitimate, communities are the “eyes and ears” of the police service. Legitimate police services would see increased cooperation and assistance by the public when attempting to prevent or solve crimes. For example, we would expect to see an increase in reports of incidents to the police. Additionally, this could include assisting police in their duties, such as stopping someone who is running away or assisting with identifying suspects. Increased legitimacy means an increase in informal social control, as communities would help to police each other, as there would be greater cohesion and alignment between police and communities’ goals, beliefs, and values. Ultimately, if police are seen as legitimate, their role in maintaining order would be less demanding, as the community would be more inclined to comply with the law and support policing efforts (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003).

Procedural justice as a pathway to legitimacy

Given the above, police legitimacy is acquired based on public perceptions of the police (Tyler, 2004). Therefore, to build and sustain legitimacy, research overwhelmingly indicates that while police effectiveness (i.e., outcomes) is relevant, so too is how police carry out their duties (the fairness of their processes and treatment) (Jackson et al., 2026; Walters and Bolger, 2019). Procedural justice highlights that when dealing with power-holding institutions, legitimacy is partly determined by the “fairness of the authority’s or institutions procedures” (Tyler, 2004: 91). If powerholders such as police, act in a way that the ‘subordinate’ feels is fair, they are more likely to “voluntarily accept the authorities’ decisions” (Tyler, 2004: 91). This is often referred to as the “quality of treatment” and the “quality of decision-making” (Blader and Tyler, 2003: 749). Deconstructing procedural justice even further, theorists argue it is built on four pillars: voice, neutrality, respect/dignity, and trustworthy motives (Meares et al., 2015). In this section, we briefly outline these pillars before theoretically applying them to technology adoption by police alongside dialogic legitimacy in the subsequent section.

The first pillar of procedural justice is that individuals want to feel as though they can voice their concerns. Being able to feel heard, or tell their side of the story, is an element of procedural justice that can improve legitimacy (Meares et al., 2015; Tyler, 2004). This, in turn, requires officers to be receptive to community/victim/offender/witness voices during calls for service, as well as during decision-making processes such as budgets. Police must consider people’s points of view and give them opportunities to speak and express their concerns, as Tyler (2004: 94) notes, “control of the outcome is not central to feeling that one is participating.”

The second pillar of procedural justice is neutrality. To gain legitimacy through procedural justice, citizens must believe the police were unbiased and “even-handed” in their decision-making process (Goodman-Delahunty, 2010; Tyler, 2008). This also includes being transparent in the decision-making process, explaining the objective steps that led an officer to the decision, and showing evidence of fairness (Meares et al., 2015). This transparency helps citizens identify neutrality in the decision-making process (Tyler, 2004). This is particularly important for groups who have been disproportionately mistreated by police, such as racialized, Indigenous, and LGBTQ2S + communities. Research shows that those who believe the police are neutral in decision-making are less likely to feel profiled or targeted (Meares, 2017).

The third pillar of procedural justice is that individuals must feel that the police treated them with respect and dignity. This is because the treatment of an individual by police impacts their definition of their own “social status, their self-worth, and their self-respect” (Tyler, 2004: 95). How someone is treated by an authority figure can impact their perception of their group, identity, and status within a community. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement is centred around countering the lack of dignity and respect given to the Black community by police (West et al., 2021). Black communities are treated “with more suspicion in public places”, “judged more harshly for the same behaviours” as White communities, and are recipients of more deadly and non-deadly use of force by police (West et al., 2021: 1; Schreer et al., 2009).

The final pillar of procedural justice is trustworthy motives. When police actively communicate their motives, their ‘why’, and those motives are seen as accepted and valid by the community, police are viewed with more legitimacy. Police are seen as having trustworthy motives when they display concern and consider the well-being of individuals who will be impacted by the decisions they make (Tyler, 2004). However, different motivations expressed by police may be accepted or deemed trustworthy by some groups and not by others. This adds to the layer of complexity of police legitimacy and the audiences that they aim to serve.

In summary, these pillars of procedural justice encourage law-abiding behaviour and have an impactful effect on legitimacy in several ways. Murphy et al. (2016: 4) note that the “fair treatment of an authority strengthens the social bonds” between the power holder (i.e., police) and those they exert power over (i.e., the community/social group which people identify with). Fair treatment by police, therefore, reaffirms and aligns individuals’ social identity with police and broader power holders and systems that they represent (Blader and Tyler, 2003). People feel as though they are represented within the power structures meaning they are more likely to align their beliefs and actions in a way that is expected of them by police, a social group in which they draw “value, status and self-worth from” (Murphy et al., 2016: 4). How the police treat a person communicates a certain status and value within society; both when police treat a person in a procedurally just and fair way, and even more so when they do not. As Bradford et al. (2014) note, fair treatment reinforces social identification by signaling respect and inclusion, fostering a sense of belonging within the community. Conversely, unfair treatment erodes social identification, signaling exclusion and marginalization. When individuals feel devalued or mistreated, their connection to the group weakens, ultimately undermining police legitimacy. This is an ongoing process and each interaction with power holders can either build or diminish social identity. Therefore, procedural justice in policing puts a clear emphasis on the process by which police communicate with their communities and the outcome of that interaction. Research has consistently shown that by using the four pillars, and the strict focus on fairness, communities will see their police services as more legitimate and, in turn, will align their behaviours and actions with those of the police (Bolger and Walters, 2019; Jackson et al., 2026; Walters and Bolger, 2019).

Theorizing a procedurally just and legitimate police digital technology adoption

Technology is often framed as a tool to improve service delivery and organizational effectiveness, enhancing the agility, reach, and responsiveness of policing. Both physical technologies, such as body-worn cameras, drones, GPS, and software tools, including predictive policing algorithms, AI, and big data analytics, are being increasingly deployed in tandem, signaling a potentially transformative shift in how policing is conducted (Ariel et al., 2018; Bradford et al., 2020; Meijer and Wessels, 2019; Ridgeway, 2018; St Louis et al., 2019). Theorizing has traditionally emphasized procedural justice as the pathway to legitimacy, primarily through direct, person-to-person interactions. However, as police increasingly rely on digital, sometimes privacy-invasive, technologies, it is crucial to examine and theorize how this shift impacts legitimacy, especially as more digital technologies mediate police-public interactions.

Thus far, despite the rapid adoption of various digital technologies by police with powerful abilities to surveil, few have theorized their potential impact on police legitimacy through a procedural justice lens. To that end, in this section, we advance the literature by drawing on dialogic legitimacy and procedural justice theories to show how police legitimacy can be strengthened when adopting digital technologies, using facial recognition technology as an exemplar. We theorize that the principles of procedural justice are transferable to, and should be applied to, the adoption and use of digital technologies by police. Just as fairness and transparency are essential in physical, direct encounters between the police and the public, they must also equally govern the more opaque digital encounters. By embedding the tenets of procedural justice, such as giving notice, offering explanation, and demonstrating impartiality, into the deployment and operation of new digital technologies, we theorize that police agencies can ensure that their technological practices enhance, rather than erode, public legitimacy. Additionally, we frame digital technology adoption as an act of dialogic legitimacy, where there is a give and take between the public and the police. That is, as police seek to expand their digital technology capabilities, at the same time, communities respond favourably or unfavourably, prompting police to adjust and rethink their technology deployments and adopt certain technologies over others based on public perceptions.

Power, dialogic legitimacy, and procedural justice

As Wells et al. (2023) note, we must not only consider technology a tool to help police accomplish their mission, but also consider how technology is changing the police-public relationship. Support for new policing technologies acts as a key predictor of public consent, essentially representing a willingness to grant police increased, and potentially intrusive, capabilities (Bradford et al., 2020). Therefore, the adoption of technology in policing can be viewed as an act of dialogic legitimacy as outlined by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012). They envision power holders and audiences as an “X and Y coordinate in a simple matrix, with the possibility not only of congruence…but also, of incongruence” (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012: 159). Dialogic legitimacy means that power holders, such as police, make legitimacy claims, and the audience then evaluates these claims and decides to accept or reject the claim to authority.

Incongruency arises when power holders see themselves as legitimate, but this view is not shared by the audience. This “legitimacy deficit” is dynamic. It can involve police claims to legitimacy in regard to a variety of topics, such as the use of force, new policies or practices, or adopting surveillance technologies, and a subsequent response by audiences. Based on audience/community reactions, police can make changes to their claims (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). For example, police may need to adjust their adoption, use, and implementation of technologies, even limit their powers and capabilities, to satisfy public demands. This process then repeats itself with police making a new claim to power with their adjusted strategy based on audience/community responses. Following this logic, if technologies are adopted using the tenets of procedural justice, they can be used to build police legitimacy. Alternatively, adopting technologies without a procedurally just approach works to reduce police legitimacy. Depending on the invasiveness of the technologies in question and public reaction, their perceived legitimacy may trump actual effectiveness or potential public safety outcomes of their use.

Facial recognition technology, police legitimacy, and procedural justice

Dialogic legitimacy and procedural justice theorizing can help to highlight particularly salient issues when it comes to police adoption of facial recognition technology (FRT). Briefly, FRT software uses algorithms to help identify people by matching a face to an already existing picture or databases of pictures (Johnson et al., 2022). The Privacy Commissioner of Canada notes that facial recognition technology is a “powerful tool of significant interest to…law enforcement”, and that, when used responsibly, could potentially offer “great benefits to society” such as enhancing national security, assisting in missing persons investigations, and helping police solve and fight crime (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2021).

However, Canadian policing has had a rocky adoption of facial recognition technologies thus far. The Privacy Commissioner report, after highlighting FRT’s capabilities, followed up with a warning that it can be a “highly invasive surveillance technology fraught with many risks.” Most famously, and most demonstrative of concerns and impacts on legitimacy, is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) adoption of Clearview AI technology, a highly invasive form of facial recognition technology that uses scraped images from the internet to identify people. Although the RCMP were not alone in their use of Clearview AI, as many police services in Canada experimented with the technology through a free trial the company was offering (Browne, 2020). The Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s office released a Special Report in June of 2021 outlining that the RCMP’s use of Clearview AI violated Canada’s federal Privacy Act legislation. As a further action, the Commissioner’s Office launched a “National Technology Onboarding Program” Pilot, which aims to examine the adoption and use of technology by federal agencies for alignment with the Privacy Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2021). The lack of oversight, guidelines, and procedures for adopting such an invasive technology calls police legitimacy into question.

Procedural justice can be seen both as a theory to guide and a strategy to deploy new technologies in policing in a way that upholds police legitimacy, particularly for those technologies which possess significant surveillance power like FRT. Using this procedural justice lens, in what follows we start to unravel and decipher what it may mean to acquire, use, and deploy FRT ‘correctly’ in policing. To do so, we return to the four pillars of procedural justice: voice, neutrality, respect/dignity, and trustworthy motives (Mazerolle et al., 2013).

Voice

The principle of voice mandates that decision-makers must actively seek, integrate, and be influenced by the input of the public and relevant stakeholders, especially those communities likely to be most affected by new technologies. Theoretically, police involving the public in the adoption, policies, use cases, and limitations of FRT would provide an opportunity for citizen voice within the decision-making process. When considering the adoption of surveillance or data-driven systems, police leadership should be guided by a central question: Will the affected communities have a meaningful opportunity to influence the technology’s design, limits, and deployment? Doing this would be a significant departure from how police currently acquire technology, where there is often more input from technology companies and other police services than there is from the public (Hill & O’Connor, 2024). When the public voice is sought out by police, it tends to be limited to consultation (e.g., submitting comments through a website) rather than genuine engagement (e.g., listening and co-constructing policy with the public) (Hill et al., 2022). Instead, we suggest that for technology acquisition, especially surveillance technologies, to be procedurally just, police must ensure that the public feels listened to and that their feedback is weighed appropriately in the decision-making process.

To ensure this engagement is not merely performative, concrete mechanisms must be established. To do so, Hill et al. (2022) suggest that the public needs accurate information on the technology from non-police sources and opportunities to dialogue about the technology with their fellow community members. These actions could include forming diverse community advisory committees, conducting community focus groups and consultations, hosting open forums to transparently address concerns, and employing accessible knowledge dissemination tools to inform the public. Furthermore, police agencies must demonstrate a commitment to seriously considering public feedback, incorporating it into policy, and maintaining continuous, open communication regarding the fears, challenges, and limitations associated with the technology. Providing communities opportunities to voice their concerns and opinions also needs to move beyond the idea of initial adoption of the technology. For a true procedurally just and dialogically legitimate process, the public must have the opportunity to provide a voice at all stages of implementation and deployment of technology, including its operating guidelines. Unfortunately, very little research exists on how the police could practically and successfully engage the public on technologies like FRT.

Neutrality

The neutrality principle demands that the technology adoption process be unbiased, transparent, and evidence-based, ensuring that the technology is applied consistently and fairly across all communities. For FRT, this would require public disclosure of the technology’s full function, its underlying data sources, and its internal decision logic, often necessitating independent scrutiny and auditing of algorithms to identify and mitigate bias. Police leaders must critically assess: Is the technology’s outcome demonstrably fair and unbiased, and is it applied consistently across diverse communities? For example, concerns have been raised about bias being built into how FRT works. That is, FRT is less able to identify racialized groups as algorithms are often trained on mostly White datasets, leading to inaccurate conclusions, misidentifications, and injustices (Allyn, 2020; Garvie et al., 2016; Hood, 2020; Kotsoglou and Oswald, 2020). Studies have shown that facial recognition algorithms are extremely accurate when it comes to identifying White faces, particularly males, but significantly less accurate when identifying “minority faces” (Furl, Phillips and O'Toole, 2002). For example, the Gender Shades project found up to 34% higher error rates when attempting to identify Black women compared to “lighter-skinned males.” Moreover, they found that error rates of classification were between 8.1 and 20.6% for female face identification in comparison to males, and 11-19% worse on individuals with darker skin tones compared to lighter tones (Boulamwini and Gebru, 2018).

To address this, robust mechanisms for continuous auditing and monitoring must be established, and their existence must be clearly and accessibly communicated to the public. Transparency is paramount and involves clearly detailing the technology’s specific use cases, eligibility criteria, and operational checks and balances, thereby addressing concerns raised through the Voice principle. For police to proceed in a procedurally just way, it would require providing the public information on what information they collect using FRT, the source material they are comparing pictures against, and where and when it is operating. There must be policies and procedures in place that guide the specific criteria, eligibility, and limits to use FRT to surveil individuals. Creating a transparent threshold for use or a checklist, much like what is used by police before issuing Amber Alerts for missing children, would help provide a neutral application of FRT technologies. However, this responsibility of defining policies and procedures for FRT technologies should not fall to the police alone. In order to be dialogically legitimate, police must be guided by and engage with, as mentioned above, the public, but also privacy institutions, civil liberty associations, civilian oversight bodies, and other impacted parties who are vested stakeholders in how technology is acquired, used, and implemented by the police.

Dignity & respect

The principle of respect requires that both the technology and its governing policies consistently uphold the dignity and respect of all individuals. Its deployment must explicitly prevent indiscriminate mass surveillance, which can inherently erode constitutional liberties, such as the freedom of assembly and association. Police leaders must therefore ask: Does the deployment of this technology treat the community with dignity, safeguard their privacy, and respect their autonomy? Balancing privacy and public safety is critical here. The more intrusive the technology (e.g., biometrics, mass surveillance, FRT), the higher the requirement for transparency and stringent policy controls. Police must be willing to precisely articulate the problem the technology is intended to solve, the exact nature of the data it collects, and the robust safeguards in place to prevent misuse.

The negative public reaction to police use of Clearview AI in Canada serves as a stark example of violating the Dignity/Respect principle. There was a lack of respect shown to the public by police using an FRT company that harvested images from the internet and social media profiles without people’s consent or any safeguards in place. This was an infringement on the expectation of privacy. The scope of this extended far beyond ‘suspects’ or ‘offenders’, and instead scraped open-source images for close matches. This led to “billions of people essentially [finding] themselves in a 24/7 police line-up” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2021). Having any kind of online presence does not relinquish someone’s rights and expectations of fair treatment. This unethical use of technology subjected large quantities of individuals unjustifiably to police investigative powers, with the potential of being identified or viewed by police for simply looking like someone. Given this, it is imperative that technology companies working with the police publicly disclose how their algorithms work and open their software to independent assessment for bias. If this is not possible, police may need to build their own technologies that can stand up to public scrutiny and demonstrate to their communities that the technologies they are using respect their rights (e.g., to privacy) (Hill et al., 2024). Again, procedural justice and dialogic legitimacy are about demonstrating a process to the public that is defensible and malleable based on public feedback.

Trustworthiness

The final procedural justice principle, Trustworthiness, requires that authorities demonstrate that the motivation for technology adoption is for genuine public benefit. More broadly, it has been noted that FRT could enhance public safety by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of police responses (Carter, 2018; Galterio et al., 2018; Hamann and Smith, 2019; Klum et al., 2014; Nesterova, 2020). Although research supporting these benefits is sparse, if this can be demonstrated to the public, it would go a long way to providing a justification for acquiring, using, and implementing FRT. This crucial assurance is realized through the establishment of robust oversight mechanisms and accountability structures, such as regular, independent audits and clear, accessible pathways for legal redress to proactively manage and respond to any misuse or errors. Police leaders must continually ask: Are we being honest and open about the technology’s true purpose, capabilities, and inherent limitations? This reiterates the necessity for transparency. A technology’s limitations do not automatically preclude its use; rather, they demand a precise and candid communication about those constraints and an explicit explanation of the program’s main goal. The public must be convinced that the technology’s benefits persuasively outweigh the articulated concerns, ensuring that the agency’s stated intentions align with its actions and that the deployment builds, rather than erodes, the community’s faith in the fairness of police practices and, more broadly, police legitimacy. As has been noted when discussing the other three pillars of procedural justice, technology acquisition, use, and implementation must consider the process of deployment. It is the ‘how’ or the ways in which technology is communicated about by police that needs more theoretical and empirical attention, alongside technological effectiveness and outcomes.

Conclusion

Theorizing on dialogic legitimacy set alongside the four pillars of procedural justice (voice, neutrality, dignity/respect, and trustworthiness) serves as a framework for ethical and effective technology adoption and deployment by police. Voice mandates active community input in technology design and deployment; Neutrality requires transparency, unbiased application, and rigorous auditing; Dignity/Respect demands the safeguarding of individual dignity and privacy against indiscriminate surveillance; and Trustworthiness compels authorities to demonstrate that the technology’s sole motivation is genuine public benefit, supported by strong accountability measures. Legitimacy is enhanced when police seek responses/consent from communities and engage them dialogically in their technology adoption.

FRT is just one example of the rapidly evolving technologization of police practices and procedures. As demonstrated in the article, the acquisition of digital technologies, like FRT, could benefit from a dialogically legitimate and procedurally just approach (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Tyler, 2025). Current research on procedural justice focuses on in-person interactions, but more attention needs to be paid to police-public interactions in the digital realm via digital technologies. As we have theorized throughout this paper, with the growing use of digital technologies (e.g., AI) by police, the adoption of procedurally just and dialogically legitimate policies, procedures, and practices by police can enhance police legitimacy (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Zaidi & O’Connor, 2025).

While the discussion in this article has been mainly theoretical, future research should examine whether taking a procedural justice approach to technology acquisition, use, and implementation empirically improves police legitimacy. Previous research has found that individuals who believed the police were legitimate trusted the police in the adoption of FRT (Bradford et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2025). However, few have examined this relationship from the other direction (i.e., the impact of technology acquisition, use, and implementation on legitimacy). Public trust in the police determines whether new technology is accepted, and how that technology is then used will, in turn, influence the level of public trust in the police. A procedurally just process is therefore not a regulatory burden, but the essential mechanism for ensuring that technological advancement strengthens police legitimacy rather than undermining it. Also, even if technology is delivered in a procedurally just way, without further research, we do not know if this has an empirical impact on legitimacy (Wells et al., 2023). Also, while our focus in this article has been to highlight the importance of procedural justice and dialogic legitimacy (the process) to police technology acquisition, use, and implementation, this is not to say that we should ignore the effectiveness of technologies (the outcome). There is still research needed on both, and particularly to determine when the process is important and when the outcome is important.

Overall, if police ensure citizens are provided a voice, perceive neutrality in decision-making, are treated with dignity and respect, and believe police have trustworthy motives, technology acquisition, use, and implementation should be seen as legitimate. By extension, so should the police use of power. Without these key pillars guiding police decision-making, the adoption of technology is likely to be haphazard and actively work against police legitimacy. Future research should examine which police services, if any, are using the four pillars of procedural justice in their adoption of digital technologies and whether this has been successful. Similarly, much work is needed on how to best operationalize dialogic legitimacy as it pertains to technology adoption by police. Documenting best practices for how police engage with their communities, who might have very diverse relationships with technology and their police services, and how to genuinely incorporate public feedback into police decision-making would go a long way in showing the public they are being listened to and that their relationship is indeed dialogical.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Madison Charman

Christopher O’Connor

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Allyn

(2020) The Computer Got It Wrong: How Facial Recognition Led to False Arrest of Black Man. NPR. 24 June. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882683463/the-computer-got-it-wrong-how-facial-recognition-led-to-a-false-arrest-inmichig

Ariel

Sutherland

Henstock

, et al. (2018) Paradoxical effects of self-awareness of being observed: testing the effect of police body-worn cameras on assaults and aggression against officers. Journal of Experimental Criminology 14(1): 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-017-9311-5

Beetham

(1991) Max weber and the legitimacy of the modern state. Analyse & Kritik 13(1): 34–45. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-1991-0102

Beetham

(1991) The Legitimation of Power. Macmillan.

Blader

Tyler

(2003) A four-component model of procedural justice: defining the meaning of a “fair” process. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29(6): 747–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203029006007

Bolger

Walters

(2019) The relationship between police procedural justice, police legitimacy, and people’s willingness to cooperate with law enforcement: a meta-analysis. Journal of Criminal Justice 60: 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2019.01.001

Bottoms

Tankebe

(2012) Beyond procedural justice: a dialogic approach to legitimacy in criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 102(1): 119–170.

Bradford

Murphy

Jackson

(2014) Officers as mirrors: policing, procedural justice and the (re)production of social identity. British Journal of Criminology 54(4): 527–550. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azu021

Bradford

Yesberg

Jackson

, et al. (2020) Live facial recognition: trust and legitimacy as predictors of public support for police use of new technology. British Journal of Criminology 60(6): 1502–1522.

10.

Browne

(2020) Toronto Police Service Confirms Some Members Tested Clearview Ai’s Controversial Facial Recognition Tool. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/6547256/toronto-police-service-confirms-some-members-testedclearview-ais-controversial-facial-recognition-tool/

11.

Buolamwini

Gebru

(2018) Gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 18: 1–15.

12.

Carter

(2018) Facing Reality: The Benefits and Challenges of Facial Recognition for the NYPD. Naval Postgraduate School. Master’s thesis.

13.

Chappell

(2017) Consent decrees and police reform: a piece of the puzzle or a puzzling policy. Criminology & Public Policy 16(2): 571–573. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12302

14.

City of Minneapolis (2023) Consent decree explained. City of Minneapolis. Available at: https://www.minneapolismn.gov/resident-services/public-safety/police-public-safety/investigations-settlement-agreement/investigations/doj/consent-decree/

15.

Feldman

Bassett

(2021) Monitoring deaths in police custody: public health can and must do better. American Journal of Public Health 111(S2): S69–S72. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306213

16.

French

JRP

Jr. Raven

(1959) The bases of social power. In: Cartwright

(ed) Studies in Social Power. University of Michigan Press, pp. 150–167.

17.

Furl

Phillips

O’Toole

(2002) Face recognition algorithms and the other-race effect: computational mechanisms for a developmental contact hypothesis. Cognitive Science 26(6): 797–815. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0364-0213(02)00084-8

18.

Galterio

Shavit

Hayajneh

(2018) A review of facial biometrics security for smart devices. Computers 7(37): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers7030037

19.

Garvie

Bedoya

Frankle

(2016) The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America. Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology.

20.

Goodman-Delahunty

(2010) Four ingredients: new recipes for procedural justice in Australian policing. Policing: Journal of Policy Practice 4(4): 403–410. https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paq041

21.

Hamann

Smith

(2019) Facial recognition technology. Criminal Justice 34(1): 9–13.

22.

Harkin

(2015) Police legitimacy, ideology and qualitative methods: a critique of procedural justice theory. Criminology and Criminal Justice 15(5): 594–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895815580397

23.

Hill

O’Connor

(2024) Towards a macro-level theoretical understanding of police services’ acquisition of risk technologies. Surveillance and Society 22(4): 395–409. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v22i4.16486

24.

Hill

O’Connor

Slane

(2022) Police use of facial recognition technology: the potential for engaging the public through co-constructed policy-making. International Journal of Police Science and Management 24(3): 325–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/14613557221089558

25.

Hill

Baker

O’Connor

, et al. (2024) Disentangling ethics in information management technologies used in public safety. In: Moffatt

Rector

(eds) Information Management Capabilities in Public Safety and Security. Springer, pp. 21–36.

26.

Hood

(2020) Making the body electric: the politics of body-worn cameras and facial recognition in the United States. Surveillance and Society 18(2): 157–169. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13285

27.

Jackson

Kuha

Bradford

, et al. (2026) Why do people cooperate with the police and criminal courts? A test of procedural justice theory in 30 countries. Criminology 64: 59–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.70022

28.

Johnson

McCurdy

, et al. (2022) 'facial recognition systems in policing and racial disparities in arrests. Government Information Quarterly 39(4): 101753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2022.101753

29.

Kelman

(1958) Compliance, identification, and internalization: three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2: 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200275800200106

30.

Klum

Han

Klare

, et al. (2014) The FaceSketchID system: matching facial composites to mugshots. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 9(12): 2248–2263. https://doi.org/10.1109/tifs.2014.2360825

31.

Kotsoglou

Oswald

(2020) The long arm of the algorithm? Automated facial recognition as evidence and trigger for police intervention. Forensic Science International: Synergy 2: 86–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2020.01.002

32.

Lind

Tyler

(1988) The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer.

33.

Mazerolle

Bennett

Davis

, et al. (2013) Procedural justice and police legitimacy: a systematic review of the research evidence. Journal of Experimental Criminology 9(3): 245–274. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-013-9175-2

34.

Mazerolle

Sargeant

Cherney

, et al. (2014) Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Policing. Springer.

35.

Meares

(2017) The path forward: improving the dynamics of community-police relationships to achieve effective law enforcement policies. Columbia Law Review 117(5): 1355–1368.

36.

Meares

Tyler

Gardener

(2015) Lawful or fair? How cops and laypeople perceive good policing. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 105(2): 297–343.

37.

Meijer

Wessels

(2019) Predictive policing: review of benefits and drawbacks. International Journal of Public Administration 42(12): 1031–1039. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2019.1575664

38.

Miceli

Segerson

Earnhart

(2022) The role of experience in deterring crime: a theory of specific versus general deterrence. Economic Inquiry 60(4): 1833–1853. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.13083

39.

Murphy

Bradford

Jackson

(2016) Motivating compliance behavior among offenders: procedural justice or deterrence? Criminal Justice and Behavior 43(1): 102–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854815611166

40.

Nesterova

(2020) Mass data gathering and surveillance: the fight against facial recognition technology in the globalized world. SHS Web of Conferences 74: 03006. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20207403006

41.

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2021) Police use of facial recognition technology in Canada and the way forward. Available at: https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/ar_index/202021/sr_rcmp/

42.

Ogunrotifa

(2023) Class root of police brutality: the missing gap in the black lives matter movement. International Critical Thought 13(3): 381–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2023.2256634

43.

O’Connor

(2008) Citizen attitudes toward the police in Canada. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 31(4): 578–595. https://doi.org/10.1108/13639510810910571

44.

O’Connor

Slane

Bouckley (Hill)

Baker

(2025) Public perceptions of facial recognition use by police in Canada. Policing and Society 35(10): 1412–1426. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2025.2508192

45.

Ridgeway

(2018) Policing in the era of big data. Annual Review of Criminology 1(1): 401–419. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-062217-114209

46.

Schreer

Smith

Thomas

(2009) “Shopping while black”: examining racial discrimination in a retail setting. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 39(6): 1432–1444. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00489.x

47.

St Louis

Saulnier

Walby

(2019) Police use of body-worn cameras: challenges of visibility, procedural justice, and legitimacy. Surveillance and Society 17(3/4): 305–321. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.8649

48.

Sunshine

Tyler

(2003) The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law & Society Review 37(3): 513–548. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5893.3703002

49.

Tankebe

(2013) Viewing things differently: the dimensions of public perceptions of police legitimacy. Criminology 51(1): 103–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2012.00291.x

50.

Tankebe

Reisig

Kane

(2014) Chapter 11: police legitimacy. In: The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing. Oxford University Press, pp. 238–259.

51.

Terpstra

(2011) Two theories on the police – the relevance of max weber and Emile Durkheim to the study of the police. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 39(1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlcj.2011.01.009

52.

Thibaut

Walker

(1978) A theory of procedure. California Law Review 66: 541–566. https://doi.org/10.2307/3480099

53.

Tyler

(1990) Why People Obey the Law. Yale University Press.

54.

Tyler

(2004) Enhancing police legitimacy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 593(1): 84–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716203262627

55.

Tyler

(2006) Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation. Annual Review of Psychology 57: 375–400. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190038

56.

Tyler

(2008) Procedural justice and the courts. Court Review 44: 25–31.

57.

Tyler

(2025) Legitimacy-based policing. Criminology & Public Policy, Online First.

58.

Tyler

Fagan

(2008) Legitimacy and cooperation: why do people help the police fight crime in their communities. Ohio St. J. Crim. L 6: 231.

59.

Walters

Bolger

(2019) Procedural justice perceptions, legitimacy beliefs, and compliance with the law: a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Criminology 15(3): 341–372. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-018-9338-2

60.

Weber

(1978).Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (G. Roth and C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1921).

61.

Wells

Aston

Bradford

, et al. (2023) Channel shift: technology mediated policing and procedural justice. International Journal of Police Science and Management 25(1): 42–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/14613557221132962

62.

West

Greenland

Laar

(2021) Implicit racism, colour blindness, and narrow definitions of discrimination: why some white people prefer “All Lives Matter” to “black lives matter. British Journal of Social Psychology 60(4): 1136–1153. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12458

63.

Zaidi

O’Connor

(2024) Policing social media: are procedural justice principles guiding Canadian police interactions online. International Journal of Police Science and Management 26(2): 258–268.