Police leadership and legitimacy in the context of a global pandemic

Abstract

This article provides original insight into police legitimacy through the lens of senior police leaders using interview data from 26 police practitioners in leadership positions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring situational contexts affecting their perceptions of self-legitimacy, it highlights competing legitimacy expectations from public audiences and elite powerholders that are exacerbated in prolonged periods of crisis. When faced with seemingly irresolvable tensions threatening their legitimacy, it demonstrates that police leaders promote audience legitimacy over the expectations and demands of elite powerholders. Cultivating their self-legitimacy by reflecting on internal audience stressors and seeking to preserve the public legitimacy of the police, this article highlights the importance of understanding police leader sense-making and self-legitimacy as highly contextual and situational. This raises questions about how police leaders conceptualise public legitimacy and normative expectations of the police role and community relations, suggesting these might be malleable and dynamic across different complex and demanding circumstances.

Introduction

The legitimacy of the public police from practical and theoretical standpoints is a steadfast topic of academic interest. Often cited as a cornerstone of legitimacy, the concept of ‘policing by consent’ holds that the legitimate authority of the police is derived from the people, key to which is the fair and impartial application of the law and use of minimum force (Home Office, 2012). The dominant approach to understanding police legitimacy is the litmus test of public perception, what Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) refer to as ‘audience legitimacy’, perceptions of legitimacy from the standpoint of those subject to police powers. Yet, as Herbert (2006) notes, pathways to police legitimacy are multifaceted and conflicting tensions in the pursuit of legitimacy are grounded in the normative conflict between state-society and police-community relations. Questions about the nature and extent of police legitimacy are therefore related to wider perceptions of the state and government, and police legitimacy is not simply a successful outcome of effective or fair operational activity (a reward for a job well done) but is dependent on more general perceptions of social justice, equity, and accountability (Reiner, 2010; Torrible, 2022).

While the body of academic work on police legitimacy is well established, less attention has been given to understanding how police officers, as those exerting power over the public, make sense of their own legitimacy (Bradford and Quinton, 2014; Gau and Paoline, 2021; Tankebe, 2019, 2022). Studies on police powerholder legitimacy from the standpoint of those holding power are gathering pace, yet much of this work is on junior officers deployed in the context of street policing (Nix and Wolfe, 2017; Tankebe, 2019, 2022; Trinkner et al., 2019; White and et al., 2021) and broader groups of police officers from different roles (Charman and et al., 2022; Kyprianides et al., 2022; Ralph, 2022). Research on powerholder legitimacy from the sole standpoint of senior leaders in policing, therefore, is underexplored. The original contribution of this paper is to address this gap in knowledge by exploring the negotiated pursuit of legitimacy during the recent COVID-19 global health pandemic, as understood by senior police leaders when divergent legitimacy demands of public and elite powerholders during a protracted period of crisis become more pronounced.

Our study explored how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders had to adapt quickly to a seismic shift in their occupational remit. In doing that, leaders articulated that their sense of public expectations of the police provided them with conceptual frameworks to guide them through the operational requirements of lockdown. This article offers rigorous insight drawn from 26 semi-structured interviews with senior police officers, senior civilian staff and key stakeholders who held positions of leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales. Following an outline of recent work on powerholder perspectives of police legitimacy, and a consideration of the complex circumstances pandemic policing created for senior police leaders, attention turns to the methodological approach underpinning the study. Findings are presented in four sections; legitimacy, lawfulness and senior leader decision-making; distributive justice and threats to legitimacy; public order policing in a pandemic and navigating the public order paradox. This article concludes by considering the implications of findings for police leader perceptions of self-legitimacy in extended periods of crisis.

Police power holder legitimacy

Generally endorsed as advocating the most likely path to securing voluntary public compliance with the police, procedural justice-based policing is grounded in the influential work of Tyler (1990, 1994, 2004). Tyler (1990) purports that the legitimacy of an institution concerns their right to exercise authoritative power over people, and if that authority is viewed as legitimate, people voluntarily act and behave in accordance with the legal instructions determined by the institution. Based on Weber’s concept of legitimacy, Debbaut and De Kimpe (2023: 691) note this approach is explained as empirical or audience legitimacy ‘acquired when citizens believe that the government has the right to dictate “appropriate behaviour” to them’. Expanding on Weber’s approach, Beetham (2013: 15–16), noting the multi-dimensional character of legitimacy, considers factors that need to be in place to give people sufficient confidence in an institution, so they willingly comply to institutional power. Hence, power is legitimate if ‘it conforms to established rules, the rules can be justified by reference to beliefs shared by both dominant and subordinate, and there is evidence of consent by the subordinate to the particular power relation’. Rather than deferring to the authority of an institution because of the power it holds to coerce or curtail actions or behaviour, it is the extent to which the police use their authority and interact with members of the public in procedurally just and fair ways that result in people viewing the police as an institution whose power is entitled to be obeyed (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 1990). As the most visible institution deploying the authority of the state over its people, the police are perceived as legitimate when people believe police actions to be morally valid, when the police are seen to abide by the same rules and laws that demand public compliance, and when people voluntarily consent to engage with the police (Bradford and Quinton, 2014; Manning, 2010; Sklansky, 2008). That people’s obligation to comply and engage with the police rests partly on their belief that police operate within a common framework of shared values, forms the normative basis for police legitimacy (Jackson et al., 2013).

Approaching legitimacy from a ‘right to rule’ approach also requires attention is paid to powerholder perspectives (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). Grounded in fundamental questions about the justification of a powerholders claim to exercise power over others, ‘right to rule’ perspectives acknowledge that public compliance can be fragile and may be revoked under certain conditions (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). Critics, including Brogden (1982) and Reiner (2010), argue that the concept of public legitimacy is an ideological construction used to justify unequal and unjust policing reflective of wider patterns of social, political and economic disadvantage. Adopting a slightly different approach, Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) note two areas that develop thinking around procedural justice. First, practitioners working in a legal arena (in this case, police officers) reflect on their legitimacy in relation to multiple audiences who may themselves ascribe to different priorities. Second, that audience’s (the public’s) perception of practitioner legitimacy is grounded in outcome fairness as well as procedural fairness. In their theoretical conceptualisation of criminal justice legitimacy, consisting of four central components significant to those subjected to state power: procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness, failure to deliver on one or more of the four components can expose a shortfall in police legitimacy (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2017).

Powerholders strive to legitimise their power to the public, and police officers perceptions of, and confidence in, their own self-legitimacy centres on their belief that the public perceives them as legitimate powerholders (Gau and Paoline, 2021; Tankebe, 2022). This version of self-legitimacy is contextualised as,

the mirror image of police legitimacy from the perspective of the policed. That is the police have a duty to behave in a certain way, and the public has a corresponding duty to support them when they do, and legitimacy pertains when both criteria are met. (Bradford and Quinton, 2014: 1026–1027)

This aspect of powerholder legitimacy is predominantly associated with operational officers as those in most frequent contact with the public, over which they hold considerable power. Members of the public who interact with the police are likely to base their perceptions of police legitimacy on how they are treated during these encounters. As these encounters can be contentious, this is a situational context where police officer claims to legitimacy can be negotiated and reassessed to consider the public response to their legitimacy claim (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012, 2013; Tankebe, 2022).

Senior powerholders within the hierarchy of police organisations seek to legitimate themselves upwards to the state or government and downwards to the public (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2013). Although the structural location of senior officers within this hierarchy limits opportunities for direct contact with the public on a regular basis, their strategic role is instrumental in shaping the remit for junior officers (Tankebe, 2022). As a perspective that has so far received limited attention, exploring self-legitimacy from the position of those with strategic leadership responsibilities is the aim of this article. Recognising the contemporary environment in which police organisations operate as one that presents complex social, political and organisational challenges for senior police leaders; to understand factors shaping their perceptions of self-legitimacy, the study concentrates on senior leaders’ experiences of guiding their organisations through the recent global pandemic.

Police powerholder legitimacy during a pandemic

Despite experience of responding to emergencies and crises, COVID-19 created a unique and untried set of circumstances for police organisations. In their review of the effect public health emergencies have on police organisations, Laufs and Waseem (2020: 2) highlight four significant areas: the psychological and mental well-being of police officers, intra-organisational challenges, inter-organisational communication and collaboration, and police-community relations. In extreme situational contexts such as those created by COVID-19, the role of police leaders is significant across these areas.

COVID-19 increased police officer vulnerability to coronavirus transmission, including the risk of physical harm from the virus to themselves and their families (Drew and Martin, 2020), and heightened anxieties around well-being and safety (Ivkovic et al., 2024; Kyprianides et al., 2022; Martin et al., 2023). Senior leader support for officer wellbeing under these conditions was important (Laufs and Waseem, 2020). So too was their response to internal challenges including diminishing workforce strength and service delivery, and officer concerns around the legitimacy of their roles and relationships with the public, given rapidly changing rules and regulations placed them at odds with the public and raised questions around curtailing civil liberties (Newiss et al., 2022).

In the United Kingdom, hundreds of laws were made in response to the coronavirus pandemic that restricted economic activity and freedom of movement (Barber et al., 2022), introducing the most extensive set of restrictions on individual liberties since World War II (House of Commons, 2020). The complexity of this fast-changing legislation and guidance placed immense pressure and new challenges on police leaders (Kyprianides et al., 2022), including superintendents tasked with interpreting and implementing these measures (Aitkenhead et al., 2022). The role of the police leader in guiding and supporting junior officers in this context was important as operational officers experienced difficulties navigating changing rules and regulations which contributed to worsening relationships with the public (Fleming and Brown, 2023) and public perceptions of police legitimacy influenced their willingness to comply with the police and were predictive indicators for their commitment to abide by Covid-19 rules and regulations (Chenane et al., 2023). This article furthers the understanding of how police leaders operated under such conditions, exploring factors they considered when making strategic decisions during the pandemic.

Method

Police legitimacy is often understood in terms of audience perspective, a quality to be deployed (or not) by the public onto the police; yet, powerholder self-legitimacy is fundamental to shaping and encouraging audience legitimacy (Tankebe, 2022). While existing research has made valuable insights into factors that erode and sustain public perceptions of police legitimacy, much of this work emanates from survey-based quantitative studies (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2021). This study in contrast adopted a qualitative approach to understanding perceptions of legitimacy from the standpoint of the senior police leader during a period of national crisis. Drawing on Geertz’s (1973) term ‘thick description’ used to describe ethnographic methods, Klenke (2014: 124) advocates the use of qualitative approaches to study leadership practices as they offer a platform and voice to participants, producing rich and detailed accounts of their experiences, thoughts and feelings and the ‘complex interrelationships among them’. This was important to the research team as semi-structured interviews were intended to capture and document the shared experiences of those in strategic leadership positions during a prolonged period of crisis, offering an original and innovative perspective largely absent from discussion around powerholder perceptions of legitimacy.

New empirical data were generated from 26 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022 with 21 participants in leadership positions in police organisations, 3 senior police staff and 2 external stakeholders. Twitter and LinkedIn, well-known social media platforms, were used to recruit participants as social media is considered an efficient and effective technique of sampling targeted or specific populations and is thought to boost participant recruitment (Sledzieski et al., 2023). The Ethics Review Committee at Northumbria University approved our interviews (approval: ID 28366) on September 1, 2021. Participants received an Information and Consent sheet prior to the interview outlining the research aims and objectives, and verbal consent was given at the start of each interview. To portray the views of senior officers in key strategic leadership positions during the pandemic, police participants rank was important and all officers who participated in the study were of superintendent or chief superintendent ranks. As upper middle managers, superintending ranks lead large complex geographical areas in police organisations, assuming responsibility for strategic and policy leads in areas across the organisation (College of Policing, 2023). All participants were active in their respective roles in England and Wales during 2020–2022 when the United Kingdom was subject to various COVID-19 lockdowns and measures and were ideally positioned to offer detailed accounts of their lived experiences of doing police leadership during a pandemic.

Interviews lasted between 45 to 95 minutes, and data analysis was driven by thematic analysis as a recognised method for analysing qualitative data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). All interviews were recorded, and once transcribed, themes were developed using an inductive approach. Transcripts were reviewed and discussed collectively by the research team at an early stage of the analysis, which enhanced familiarity with the data and enabled the research team to generate initial themes from the dataset. With the aid of specialist NVivo software, coding was then completed by more than one member of the research team, as adopting a collaborative and reflexive approach would permit a deeper understanding of the data (Braun and Clarke, 2019). The data and findings presented in this article are those relevant to perceptions of legitimacy; other themes emerging from the data are reported elsewhere (e.g. Rowe et al., 2025).

Any detail that could potentially disclose a participant’s identity had been withheld to uphold guarantees of confidentiality given to participants at the time of interview. Pseudonyms are used throughout, and no reference is made to organisation, role, rank, or geographical area.

Findings

Legitimacy, lawfulness and senior leader decision-making

The first national lockdown in the United Kingdom thrusts senior police leaders into unknown and uncharted territories. Edward, who worked in an operational context where bouts of crisis were frequent but short-lived, spoke of policing during the pandemic as one of the most challenging periods they had experienced. Recalling the early COVID-19 scenario planning as fraught with difficulties, Edward described this period as

Looking into a bit of an abyss . . . I suppose you could probably try and summarise it as trying to keep the organisation on side, trying to keep the public on side, and trying to do the right thing around the pandemic and public health.

Internal organisational audiences experienced different stressors depending upon their role within the wider police organisation. When colleagues were isolating, unwell or working from home, many participants maintained regular personal contact through ‘old school’ telephone calls, and another hosted a daily ‘pub quiz’ to generate some normal interaction. Two participants recalled planning ‘doomsday’ scenarios to reassure Chief Constables and Police and Crime Commissioners that if front-line resources were depleted, sufficient levels of operational services could continue. Notwithstanding the multiple stressors experienced by different internal audiences, of heightened concern to participants was deciphering and implementing legislation, policy, and guidelines amid quixotic expectations from external elite powerholders.

Participants’ position within the hierarchy of the organisation was expressed succinctly by Oliver who recalled acting as a ‘conduit between our force Gold Group [Chief Officer Team] . . . trying to turn strategy into reality for our staff on the front line’. Described by one participant as pulling ‘the big blue lever’, participants spoke of situations where the government expected the police to do what was needed, and with immediate effect. Yet many expressed frustration operating in an environment with little or no prior notification from the government of their intent to introduce social and economic restrictions affecting public life, including scenarios where legislation had yet to be enacted for the date regulations came into effect:

There would be an announcement that the rules have changed, yet there was no legislation to back it up. So, Boris [Johnson, then UK Prime Minister] would say as of tomorrow, face masks are mandatory in shops and if you don’t wear one you will get fined, and the police will deal with you. Yet there was no legislation that allowed policing to deal with it or even fine people (Bob).

As senior officers with strategic leadership responsibilities, participants were familiar with the disparity between political rhetoric, their own reality, and the importance of maintaining legitimacy while, as one participant put it, ‘doing the government’s business for them’. Jim reflected on how police leaders routinely use their autonomy to make pragmatic and difficult decisions, translating legislative directives into operational practices when seeking legitimacy from the state. Alluding to the fragility of audience legitimacy, Jim noted how striking the right balance between under- and over-enforcement of public health laws is important but difficult to achieve in practice, as a diverse public has conflicting demands and expectations of policing:

Legitimacy depends upon the public being compliant and agreeing with the principles of enforcement. So, in terms of us going through that period [the pandemic] we’ve had to tread a very careful line in terms of our correspondence with the public about what we are doing about it, because there’s always noises about we’re not doing enough. But if you overstep that boundary, you’ll quickly see that there’s going to be in the wider part of society a response to over-policing. So, it’s a tricky thin blue line, isn’t it? And actually, it’s never as simple as the government saying, ‘you must, this legislation is what you’ve got’. Because we’ll always be in trouble in policing. There’ll never be a moment we’re [not] in trouble with this because we are the ones that interpret the government’s intention.

During COVID-19, laws changed rapidly in response to outbreaks of the disease, and some participants accepted there were occasions where government guidance was framed differently from the guidance they, as senior police leaders, instructed their officers to follow:

What you saw was some of the government guidance being out on the gov website inferring things which weren’t in the regulations at all because they [government] were trying to influence public behaviour. So of course, when our guidance then goes out to our frontline staff it says something slightly different because we’ve stuck to the law because that’s all we can give guidance on. So we had a number of occasions where government guidance and our own differed . . . from a leadership perspective the key issue is set a really clear expectation . . . if you haven’t yet got the guidance, notwithstanding the fact the regs come in at midnight, do not enforce it because until you’ve got the guidance you can’t be confident that you’re enforcing it correctly. So, I was off message from government on a number of occasions because I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t ask staff to go and enforce something that they hadn’t had guidance on yet.

Underpinning Dean’s sense-making was a commitment to the concept of lawfulness and adherence to the rule of law. Setting clear boundaries for operational officers assisted in maintaining his legitimacy with them; while attempting to alleviate potential stressors by insisting they exercise only those powers explicitly permitted by law, an important factor in securing public support for pandemic policing.

Distributive justice and threats to legitimacy

Public perceptions of unequal treatment by the police are a source of public resentment (Sarat, 1977). Hence, when people are treated fairly and justice outcomes are distributed evenly among different groups in society, the public are more likely to be supportive of police actions and authority (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2021; Jones and et al., 1996; Mazerolle and et al., 2013; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003). This is important in contextual situations such as COVID-19 when perceptions of unfair treatment could be heightened (Charman et al., 2022). Describing what one participant called ‘an over saturation of information’, the challenge of keeping abreast of frequently changing guidance was important to sustaining their internal organisational legitimacy. Inter-agency communication and collaboration with informal stakeholders was also valuable, as Oliver, who conducted joint patrols with key community contacts, printed information in different languages, and made use of existing community platforms to impart information to the public, illustrates

I ran a community Gold meeting . . . People who purport to be key representatives of certain communities . . . put themselves forward as representing those communities. So that was a good opportunity just to sense check the community feeling and what was a concern. And it was often a place where questions would get asked about what can we or can’t we do. And particularly when you got into the nuances of funerals and all that sort of stuff.

Restrictions on the number of people attending funerals during different phases of COVID-19 were cited as examples of the uneven distribution of justice, particularly among marginalised groups whose lifestyles and normative cultural traditions amplified their visible rule-breaking during COVID-19:

Because the legal guidance isn’t clear, it leaves massive loopholes. So some of the challenges were policing that fairly, so things like funerals particularly, so I would think there’s been even more bias placed on groups like travellers for example (Geoff).

These situations were further exacerbated through the private behaviours of government officials. When the actions of politicians and their advisors, as those who wrote COVID-19 rules and subsequently breached them, came to light, several participants identified this as a factor that could derail public support for their newly imposed position as enforcers of public health laws. As one participant suggested, this created conditions where ‘compliance is seen as optional’.

Reflecting on the criminalisation of normative public behaviour during periods of COVID-19 exposed the difficulty of reconciling what Thomas saw as stepping outside norms and values officers associated with their roles and enforcing public health laws when they struggled to see the value or benefit from a police or public perspective:

Nobody joined the job to give a fixed penalty ticket to a family of six when they could only have four in the house for Christmas dinner, that’s not what policing is about . . . It tested our legitimacy . . . I took pretty much zero pleasure out of that . . .. it’s a difficult place to be when you’re enforcing law against people who actually are otherwise very decent people, and that isn’t a comfortable place to be, and we were tested emotionally there as police officers, I think, in how we did that.

Participants recalled that in the situational context of a pandemic, as opposed to assuming that if the police act in accordance with the law in their pursuit of public health outcomes, the public would see them as legitimate, public opposition to COVID-19 laws often had a reverse effect:

We’re now seeing the impact of protest activity, personal freedom campaign groups, all coalescing together, and seeing policing essentially as embodiment of the state at which they can have a go at because they disagree with state policy . . . There are certain groups, who we’ve never encountered a problem with before in policing, who all of a sudden, we’re one of their biggest enemies . . . we were policing a part of the community we would never have dealt with before who had absolutely no contact with policing now they’ve had adverse encounters with policing, and those contacts leave a trace (Matt).

As the symbolic and physical embodiment of the state, participants were aware that conditions described by Matt were conducive to altering public perception of the police through negative experiences of policing that could shape their perception of policing beyond the pandemic.

Public order policing in a pandemic

This balance was starkly evident in the public order policing of large-scale protest. ¹ Preexisting community tensions were factors identified by participants as having potential to compound public tensions during Covid-19 and revive long-standing hostility towards the police. One participant spoke of a long history of challenges in their operational context where police actions were viewed ‘through a particular lens’. Another feared lockdown would revoke memories of urban clashes between police and the public during previous eras of economic and political unrest, where the police were seen as ‘an enforcement arm of a [political] agenda’. Several expressed concern that pandemic policing could exacerbate public perceptions of the police when legitimacy was already tested through broader public concern over discriminatory and unethical police practices in the wake of high-profile cases of officer misconduct and serious criminality that had shaken public confidence in policing:

Externally, there were some real challenges legislatively in the relationship between policing and the community. The fundamentals of policing by consent were really stretched for us because it placed us into a level of confrontation with the public that isn’t really criminal. It’s public health, I get it, protecting life – of course – but it stretched that relationship for us, and it put us into a greater degree of conflict. You can see that police legitimacy is pretty fragile at the moment, or public legitimacy of the police . . . So you’ve got Covid-19 going on and then you’ve got Couzens2 going on, you’ve got Black Lives Matter going on, you’ve got all of these things that are eroding confidence and then Covid-19 is just another one of those layered on top (Wendy).

Oliver describes the unusual and contentious pressures for police leaders when public order policing demanded the simultaneous policing of social distancing measures:

[discussing the challenge of protest policing] So that was a bit of a tension point for us . . . trying to balance, ‘hang on a minute, Articles 9, 10 and 11 give you a fundamental right to peaceful protest, but the regulations in effect say you can’t’. That was very, very difficult to navigate through.

During lockdown periods, peaceful protest in large gatherings were in breach of COVID-19 regulations. Yet the right to peaceful protest is protected in human rights legislation and that interference from a policing perspective would raise questions of political partisanship, impartiality, and the boundaries of the police role during the pandemic, was recognised by participants. Thomas (cited above) summed up the dilemma as one whereby if police leaders facilitated what they saw as a lawful right to protest they were effectively ‘turning a blind eye to COVID-19 restrictions’ and their predicament was a ‘catch 22’ situation where they were unable to ‘satisfy both a right and a wrong’. Participants were attuned to these issues finding ways to enable protests under these conditions as the next section illustrates.

Navigating the public order paradox

Ambiguity surrounding the legality of public protest under pandemic conditions challenged the legitimacy of the police and their relationship with the public (Newiss et al., 2022), leaving the police open to allegations of ‘politicised enforcement activity’ (Aitkenhead et al., 2022: 23). Leading the response to public protests in their force area, Jim prioritised the right to protest with a view to minimising the risk of protester behaviour escalating:

It’s about permissible ability to engage with protest communities to say, ‘we support your activity, but we need to minimise the impact on the wider community’ . . . we [police leadership in the force] set the tone really well on that very first operation, giving them absolutely free reign with policing support to do their protest. Because had we not then I think, because there was a protest every week thereafter, and I think they’d have ramped up their game . . . I think policing is just uniquely placed for [senior leaders] anyway to have to consider proportionality and necessity within the ethical and moral implications of action. You’ve got to be a philosopher these days.

For Jim, ‘getting the balance right’ was dependent upon facilitating public protest under pandemic restrictions to avoid unnecessary confrontation which, had this occurred, would be indicative of a loss of public consent and compliance.

Others saw public order situations as opportunities to challenge their thinking as police leaders and adjust their traditional approach to policing protests. Wendy talked about using public protest as occasions to facilitate and promote positive communication and engagement with members of the public through a series of events designed to promote legitimacy which they were keen to continue and embed post-pandemic:

I began to think about those events [public protests] quite differently. Rather than thinking of them as an event to control, thinking of them as an event where we have an opportunity to engage with a group of the public that we wouldn’t normally have great levels of contact with . . . we started to go out into those environments with officers with tablets asking for feedback about our service and stuff like that. We tried to actively change the nature of the dialogue and that approach is something that we’re going to continue from hereon in.

Central to Becky’s decision-making was the realisation that public order policing in the context of a public health pandemic could create situations where the police were compromising their own legitimacy, and part of their approach was to consider what police legitimacy would look like from the standpoint of the public:

Protests took place during Covid-19 that I thought were less harmful to allow to proceed than they were to try and prevent . . . to prevent a protest would involve individuals getting very close, it would involve officers potentially getting hands on with members of the public . . . we’ve had deaths following police contact here and people wanted to protest about that, how does that look if the police that you’re wanting to protest about are stopping you from protesting about it . . . But if I don’t facilitate then it could be worse because you get hands on, you lose the trust and confidence of the section of the community, they therefore don’t comply with legislation around Covid-19 for months going forward, so it’s always that balancing act of, again, going back to what was the least harmful solution . . . I had to write bold strategies where I’m explicitly saying ‘I’m not going to act on breaches of legislation which has been put in around a national health emergency’.

Focussing on harm reduction to the public to guide their decision-making was considered by Becky the simplest way as a senior police leader to convey the application of COVID-19 laws and rules in these situations to their staff. Inter-organisational communication and collaboration provided opportunities to engage with the public and wider community to encourage and sustain public consent and compliance. Facilitating this in practice was described by Becky as drawing on help and support from independent advisory groups and public community leaders for their backing and to assist with protest planning. In explaining the rationale for their choices, and offering justifications for their decision-making, Becky is demonstrating how cultivating their self-legitimacy involved balancing multiple audience stressors and looking within the organisation to consider the impact on operational officers, looking outside the organisation to consider the public and wider community groups, and when looking upwards to government, having courage and confidence in their position and decision-making to exercise their autonomy and independence and deviate from legislative directives.

Discussion

The political use of the police as a state institution during periods of turmoil and unrest is not new (Scraton, 1985), and police leaders are experienced in dealing with complicated and challenging situations, including balancing competing interests and demands (Baran and Scott, 2010; Herrington and Colvin, 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic was exceptional, however, in that rapidly changing situational contexts created unpredictable and ambiguous socio-political environments over a prolonged period (Kyprianides et al., 2022). In such extreme operational landscapes, normative situations, behaviours and actions were perceived and experienced very differently. In the context of a public health crisis, legal restrictions on previously innocuous behaviours presented a substantial threat to police legitimacy (Jones, 2020). That the public perceived the police as the enforcement arm of the state in Covid-19 (Inkpen et al., 2023) is indicative of the potential to disrupt and destabilise public perceptions of police legitimacy. This complexity was recognised by police leaders in our study, who tried to manage internal and external audiences’ stressors by promoting officer, organisation and their own legitimacy while attempting to avoid alienating the public who conflated unpopular government policy with police practice.

According to Bottoms and Tankebe (2021), police leaders seek to legitimise themselves to elite political powerholders and meet a basic expectation of legitimacy from the public to ensure police powers are exercised in accordance with the law. This was difficult in COVID-19 due in part to what Maskaly et al. (2021: 276) note were untenable situations arising from political leadership lacking in guidance and direction. Senior leaders in policing, well versed in implementing policy and strategy in accordance with organisational and national directives, are familiar with the gap between ‘policy-as-written’ and ‘policy-as-practiced’ (Davidovitz et al., 2021). While they may regard this as a tricky but albeit normal part of translating government policy into operational practice, the volume of rapidly changing, hyperbolic, and at times unworkable government directives, amplified this gap during COVID-19. Evidence from our study indicate that while this was problematic, it was the extra-ordinary political expectation to operate outside the rule of law and perform duties that had yet to be formalised in legislation that tested and challenged their self-legitimacy and conversely impacted on internal police officer audiences.

Our findings show conflicting legitimacy expectations from elite political powerholders and public audiences intensified in crisis contexts such as COVID-19, and when this happens, senior leaders prioritise lawfulness and adherence to the rule of law. They do this knowing the outcome of their decisions will result in operational drift between government and police leader guidance, positioning them at odds with the demands of elite powerholders. Prioritising audience legitimacy is important, however, as power exercised ‘in accordance with established rules . . . is the first condition of its legitimacy’ (Beetham, 2013: 64).

Police leaders recognise public compliance and perceptions of police legitimacy as fragile and fluid in untested and complex landscapes, such as COVID-19. These views are valid insofar as waning public trust in political institutions can reduce voluntary compliance with the law (Marien and Hooghe, 2010) as was the case during the pandemic (Fancourt et al., 2020). Examples of public order situations shifting rapidly from peaceful to volatile protest (see Stott et al., 2021) also indicate a reluctance to accept decisions made by state institutions in specific circumstances. Crises such as COVID-19 are characterised by untypical and extraordinary conditions where context is crucial as context impacts and changes leadership and vice versa (Osborn et al., 2002). Hence, it is the contextual situations characterising a crisis that can jeopardise the central goals of an organisation (Weick, 1988) particularly as one or more extreme events can occur while an organisation is in a crisis context (Hannah et al., 2009, 2014).

This was the case during COVID-19 where high-profile protests in English cities created what Charman et al. (2022: 15) suggest was the ‘perfect storm’ in terms of challenges to police legitimacy, the policing of public order and protest under pandemic conditions. In this sense, Herrington and Colvin (2015), borrowing loosely from Grint’s (2010) analysis of tame (complicated), wicked (complex), and critical (crisis) problems, cite public order policing as an example of a tame (i.e. a complicated but familiar problem for police leaders who can draw on operational strategies and tactics that have previously proven successful) yet wicked problem due to the complex underlying reasons for a breakdown in public order and the context in which they occur.

Under such conditions, leaders look for new ways of tackling wicked problems (Herrington and Colvin, 2015) and sense-making in crisis situations is crucial (Weick, 1988). How senior leaders operationalised public order policing in COVID-19 was important as public perceptions of police legitimacy are predictors for whether the public challenge or comply with the law in these contexts (Stott et al., 2021). The actions of leaders can serve to deescalate or aggravate the conflict and turbulence of the situation (Hannah et al., 2009), and our findings suggest police leaders are very aware of this. They are appreciative of how, when public and police come together under such conditions, neither do so with ‘blank minds’ (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2021: 96), lending support to the point Herbert (2006) makes that securing police legitimacy is best understood as an ongoing process given the multiplex relationship between police exercising power and authority over diverse groups of people.

Under complex conditions such as COVID-19, police leaders had to work out how to do normal things differently to best fit challenging situational contexts with a view to nurturing long-term public legitimacy. Our study supports the claim that decisions leaders take in difficult situations are shaped by a process of ongoing sense-making receptive to front line operations (Baran and Scott, 2010) where what is known about a situation or context, assists in making decisions more robust, particularly under scrutiny (Weick et al., 2005). This is important considering evidence from this study that senior powerholders can and do exercise operational independence to make difficult but, from their standpoint, morally right professional judgements. Hence the metaphorical ‘appropriate space’ between operational policing decisions and political influence (Caless and Tong, 2013) we suggest is grounded in context, situation, and perception. As senior powerholders, police leaders do not make the law. They do expect to be seen as legitimate individuals who make strategic and ethically sound decisions in the best interests of their internal organisational audiences and the wider public, particularly when faced with competing and seemingly irresolvable tensions that pose a threat to their legitimacy.

Conclusion

In studies of police legitimacy, the standpoints of police leaders are often overlooked, yet these senior powerholders play a pivotal role in shaping mandate and strategy for junior and chief officers and cultivating public legitimacy in policing. They are often responsible for managing governance from central government and Police and Crime Commissioners and Mayors. Crisis contexts produce unique exigencies for leaders in policing, creating conditions conducive to their self-legitimacy being actively tested and challenged by complex and contradictory situations, and competing legitimacy demands from public audiences and elite powerholders. Retaining confidence in their self-legitimacy involves doing the right thing in line with the rule of law and satisfying themselves that, as senior powerholders, their decisions do not undermine efforts to cultivate public legitimacy by creating counterproductive operational contexts out of kilter with the central components of police legitimacy. Achieving this requires police leaders to consider what police legitimacy looks like from the perspective of the policed, not through direct contact with various public audiences, but reflecting on ways in which their decisions and actions shape the operational remit of junior officers and how this might be experienced by members of the public. It is here where new forms of sense-making framed in context and situation are important if police leaders are to justify difficult decisions to consciously prioritise adherence to the rule of law over government directives and promote audience legitimacy over the expectations and demands elite powerholders make of them. As police organisations become increasingly drawn into contentious and complex situations that threaten their legitimacy, more research from senior leader powerholder standpoints is needed. The small number of participants in our study, its focus on English and Welsh policing, and the focus on the COVID-19 case might limit the generalisations that can be made from our study. Nonetheless, this paper does provide robust qualitative evidence of elite powerholder sense-making and their self-legitimacy during the COVID-19 period. If future research were to combine qualitative insights with quantitative survey data, a fuller understanding of this dynamic area is possible, particularly in provocative, unpredictable and untested situational contexts.