Thiago R. Oliveira

Thiago R. Oliveira

Lecturer in Criminology, The University of Manchester

Publications

Forthcoming in 2025

Thiago R. Oliveira. Law and Society Review.

See abstract Abstract: Public experiences with the law in some neighborhoods are marked by an overwhelming police presence alongside deep-seated beliefs that legal agents are disinterested in ensuring public safety. This mutual experience of intrusive policing and legal cynicism has important implications for people’s recognition of the legitimacy of legal authority. In the context of a global city in the Global South, this study provides a quantitative assessment of the dynamics of perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection and the implications of those experiences for beliefs about the legitimacy of legal institutions. Drawing on a three-wave longitudinal survey representative of adult residents of eight neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil (N = 1,200), I demonstrate that perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection (a) are two sides of the same coin, being produced by similar social forces and dynamically reproducing each other and (b) operate to undermine police legitimacy. Integrating the legal cynicism and procedural justice theoretical frameworks, this study shows that intrusive as well as unheeding and neglectful policing practices can contribute to delegitimizing legal authority. I conclude with a discussion about the distribution of repression and protection and highlight the urgency of exploring public-authority relations in the Global South.
Keywords: legal cynicism, intrusive policing, police legitimacy, procedural justice theory, Brazil.

Preprint available on SocArXiv.

Replication materials here.

2024

9. Did the Murder of George Floyd Damage Public Perceptions of Police and Law in the United States?

Adam Fine, Thiago R. Oliveira, Jon Jackson, Ben Bradford, Rick Trinkner, Krisztian Posch. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.

See abstract Abstract:
Objectives: The police killing of George Floyd energized the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement across the United States in the summer of 2020. We test the impact on public perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of the police and law.
Methods: A four-state, three-wave, short-term longitudinal study (N = 1048; Arizona, Michigan, New York, and Texas) used a novel design focused on differences in change over time to test whether public perceptions changed after the killing of Floyd.
Results: Fielding multiple outcome markers, as well as multiple pseudo-placebo comparison variables, we found that perceptions of police procedural justice, distributive justice, and bounded authority, as well as perceptions of the legitimacy of the police and law, declined following Floyd's murder. Levels of trust in science, identification with healthcare workers, and collective efficacy perceptions did not change. As discussed in the paper, the effects varied by participants’ political views.
Conclusions: The police killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests seemed to have damaged attitudes towards police and the law.
Keywords: procedural justice, police perceptions, police legitimacy, police brutality.

Find paper here. Replication materials here.

8. Aggressive policing and undermined legitimacy: Assessing the impact of police stops at gunpoint on perceptions of police in São Paulo, Brazil

Thiago R. Oliveira. Journal of Experimental Criminology.

See abstract Abstract:
Objectives: Test the effects of a recent police stop and a recent police stop at gunpoint on changes in attitudes towards the police among residents of Brazil’s biggest city.
Methods: A three-wave longitudinal survey of São Paulo residents (2015-2019) measured people’s beliefs about police legitimacy, expectations of police fairness, effectiveness, and overpolicing, whether they were recently stopped by the police, and whether officers had pointed a gun at them during that stop. Analysis is carried out using matching methods for panel data.
Results: While estimates are too imprecise to suggest an effect of a recent police stop on attitudinal change, recent police stops at gunpoint decrease public expectations of police fairness, increase expectations of over- policing, and harm public beliefs of police legitimacy.
Conclusions: Under a credible conditional parallel trends assumption, this study provides causal evidence on the relationship between aggressive policing practices and legal attitudes, with implications to public recognition of legal authority in a major Global South city.
Keywords: Aggressive policing, Brazil, causal inference with panel data, perceptions of police, police legitimacy, police stops, procedural justice

Find paper here. Replication materials here.

2023

7. Economic inequality and the spatial distribution of stop and search: evidence from London

Joel Suss & Thiago R. Oliveira. The British Journal of Criminology.

See abstract Abstract: We analyse the spatial concentration of stop and search (S&S) practices. Previous work argues that the persistent reliance on S&S, despite weak to null deterrent effects on crime, results from a social order maintenance motivation on the part of the police. Expanding previous studies that focused on *who* tends to be stopped and searched by police officers, we focus on *where* S&S concentrates and investigate the role of economic inequality. We use data from London in 2019 and demonstrate that a novel measure of salient, spatially-granular economic inequality is positively associated with S&S incidence at a small spatial scale, even when controlling for crime rates and other important variables. Police officers more frequently stop and search members of the public in places where the well-off and the economically precarious co-exist. Implications for understanding S&S as a tool which distinguishes between citizens, between those to protect and potential criminals, are discussed.
Keywords: policing, stop and search, economic inequality, police effectiveness, social control

Find paper here. Replication materials here.

6. From an offender-based to an offense-based justice: Changes in sentencing patterns in the Brazilian juvenile justice system from 1990 to 2006

Thiago R. Oliveira, Marcos Cesar Alvarez, & Bruna Gisi . Crime, Law, and Social Change.

See abstract Abstract: Juvenile justice systems around the globe are becoming increasingly more similar to criminal justice systems. In Brazil, previous legislations focused on the individuals themselves and did not distinguish between young offenders and children in precarious conditions, but a new legislation in 1990 marked a rupture and introduced elements of criminal law. We leverage a unique data set representative of every adolescent who has been through the juvenile justice system in the state of São Paulo between 1990 and 2006 and provide a quantitative assessment of the changes in sentencing patterns in the period. Results suggest that judges increasingly prioritise violent and drug-related offenses when convicting adolescent defendants, indicating that the Brazilian juvenile justice system progressively resembles the criminal justice rationale by emphasising the ideal of proportionality between crime and punishment. We conclude with a discussion on pendular justice, suggesting that juvenile justice in Brazil is moving from a positivist-inspired to a classic-inspire justice system.

Find paper here. Replication materials here.

2022

5. Fear and legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: police-citizen relations in a high violence, high fear city

Jon Jackson, Krisztián Pósch, Thiago R. Oliveira, Ben Bradford, Silvia Camões, Ariadne Natal, & André Zanetic. Law & Society Review.

See abstract Abstract: We examine consensual and coercive police–citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self-regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual and coercive police–citizen relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where the ability to use force can often be palpable in even mundane police–citizen interactions, where some people fear police but also tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the military police as “just another (violent) gang” has significant cultural currency? Legitimacy has two components—assent (ascribed right to power) and consent (conferred right to govern)—and consistent with prior work from the US, UK, and Australia, we find that procedural justice is key to the legitimation of the police. Yet, the empirical link between legitimacy and legal compliance is complicated by ambivalent authority relations, rooted in part in heightened cultural expectations about police use of force to exercise power. We finish the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

Find paper here.

2021

Thiago R. Oliveira & Jon Jackson. Tempo Social.

See abstract Abstract. We review the concepts of legitimacy, trust, and legal cynicism in the context the debate about police legitimacy, discuss the extent to which these concepts relate to each other, and offer some early, speculative thoughts on how a relational model of legitimacy can extend beyond procedural justiceconcerns. Relying upon procedural justice theory, we emphasise the distinction between police legitimacy and legitimation: popular legitimacy is defined as public beliefs that legal authority has the right to rule (people acknowledge the moral appropriateness of legal authority) and the authority to govern (people recognise legal authority as the rightful authority), whereas legitimation is related to the criteria people use to judge the normative appropriateness of legal agents’ exercise of power (e.g., the extent to which police officers are trustworthy to behave in accordance with people’s normative expectations). Building on studies on legal cynicism and legal socialisation, we consider how other aspects of police conduct can send negative relational messages about people’s value within society and undermine their judgements about the legitimacy of legal authority –messages of oppression, marginalisation,and neglectover the life course. We conclude suggesting avenues for future research on public-police relations.

Find paper here.

3. Are trustworthiness and legitimacy ‘hard to win, easy to lose’? A longitudinal test of the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact

Thiago R. Oliveira, Jon Jackson, Kristina Murphy, & Ben Bradford. Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

See abstract Objectives: Test the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on changes in attitudes towards the police.
Methods: A two-wave panel survey of a nationally representative sample of Australian adults measured people’s beliefs about police trustworthiness (procedural fairness and effectiveness), their duty to obey the police, their contact with the police between the two waves, and their evaluation of those encounters in terms of process and outcome. Analysis is carried out using autoregressive structural equation modeling and latent moderated structural models.
Results: The association between both process and outcome evaluation of police-citizen encounters and changes in attitudes towards the police is asymmetrical for trust in police effectiveness, symmetrical for trust in procedural fairness, and asymmetrical (in the opposite direction expected) for duty to obey the police. Little evidence of heterogeneity in the association between encounters and trust in procedural fairness and duty to obey, but prior levels of perceived effectiveness moderate the association between outcome evaluation and changes in trust in police effectiveness.
Conclusions: The association between police-citizen encounters and attitudes towards the police may not be as asymmetrical as previously thought, particularly for changes in trust in procedural fairness and legitimacy. Policy implications include considering public-police interactions as ‘teachable moments’ and potential sources for enhancing police trustworthiness and legitimacy.

Find paper here. Replication materials here.

2. Police legitimacy and the norm to cooperate: using a mixed effects location scale model to estimate the strength of social norms at a small spatial scale

Jon Jackson, Ian Bruton-Smith, Ben Bradford, Thiago R. Oliveira, Krisztián Pósch, & Patrick Sturgis. Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

See abstract Abstract.
Objectives: Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhoodto the next. Estimate whether perceived police legitimacy predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods,but not in strong-norm neighborhoods where most people are either willing or unwilling to cooperate, irrespective of their perceptions of police legitimacy.
Methods: A survey of 1,057individuals in 98 relatively high-crime English neighborhoodsdefined at a small spatial scale measured (a) willingness to cooperate using a hypothetical crime vignette and (b) legitimacy using indicators of normative alignment between police and citizen values. A mixed-effects,location-scale model estimated the cluster-level mean and cluster-level variance of willingness to cooperateas a neighborhood-level latent variable. A cross-level interaction tested whether legitimacy predicts individual-level willingness to cooperate only in neighborhoods where the norm is weak.
Results: Willingness to cooperate clustered strongly by neighborhood. Therewere neighborhoods with (i) high meanand low variance, (ii) high meanand high variance, (iii) (relatively) low meanand low variance, and (iv) (relatively) low meanand high variance. Legitimacy was only a positive predictor of cooperation in neighborhoods that had a (relatively) low mean and high variance. There was little variance left to explain in neighborhoods where the norm was strong.
Conclusions: Findings support a boundary condition of procedural justice theory: namely, that cooperationcan be modelled asa place-based norm that variesin strengthfrom neighborhood to neighborhoodand that legitimacy only predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in neighborhoods where the norm is relatively weak.

Find paper here.

2019

1. Juvenile Sentencing: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Thiago R. Oliveira. Brazilian Political Science Review.

See abstract Abstract: How do socially relevant attributes influence juvenile criminal sentencing? While judicial decisions should, in principle, be fully based on legally relevant factors such as the seriousness of the offense and the defendant’s criminal record, I ask whether and how extralegal characteristics related to the adolescent’s position in structural relations affect the decision-making process. I propose a mixed-methods design to study mechanisms of criminal sentencing. Using data from a representative sample of the São Paulo juvenile justice system records, I estimate mixed-effects logistic models to assess the probability of being sentenced to confinement given certain extralegal attributes, while controlling for legally relevant variables. Interaction effects show that adolescents registered as full-time students and classified as drug users are more likely to be sentenced to confinement than their counterparts, even when the arraignment is the same. The second step involved weekly visits to the juvenile courthouse in São Paulo over four months to observe judicial hearings. Prosecutors are central to the decision-making process. The standard decision-making mechanism is based on police documents and legally relevant information. When there is a rupture in the definition of the situation (usually when non-minority defendants enter the courtroom), a new mechanism emerges and more lenient decisions are made.

Find paper here. Replication materials here.