Research consistently indicates that race and ethnicity, as well as the nature of police encounters, are associated with differences in how individuals evaluate police behaviour and the degree of trust they place in law enforcement. Marginalised communities, often characterised by lower socioeconomic status, reduced social capital and minority status, tend to report less favourable experiences and lower levels of trust. However, most studies focus on police-initiated stops, despite policing being largely reactive and centred on citizen-initiated service calls. This study aims to shift attention to these encounters in Amsterdam to examine whether disparities in perceived procedural justice persist when citizens actively seek assistance. This study also assesses whether the relationship between procedural justice and institutional trust varies across social groups.
This study uses open-access survey data from the 2019 Ethnic Profiling Monitor in Amsterdam. The geographically stratified data set ensures representativeness and includes 186 respondents who initiated police contact. Social group membership is operationalised through a binary “Western/non-Western” classification based on ethnic and racial background. This reflects a dominant Dutch classificatory framework that structures social hierarchies according to perceived proximity to Dutch or European norms and often functions as a mechanism of othering, superseding more specific ethnic or racial identities. The analysis examines disparities in perceived procedural justice and whether its relationship with institutional trust varies across groups, using ANCOVA and moderation models while controlling for age, gender, economic status and contact frequency.
Procedural justice emerges as a strong and consistent predictor of trust: perceptions of fairness, respect and attentiveness are associated with higher institutional trust across all respondents. Initial estimates show lower perceived procedural justice among non-Western participants, but this difference becomes non-significant once economic status is included, indicating that socioeconomic position largely accounts for the gap. In contrast, a significant trust gap persists even after adjustments, with non-Western respondents reporting lower institutional trust. This pattern points to a residual “symbolic” trust gap not fully explained by immediate interactional experiences. Unadjusted models further suggest a stronger fairness–trust association among marginalised groups, though this moderating effect weakens when structural conditions are taken into account.
Disparities in perceptions of procedural justice and institutional trust remain a persistent challenge among marginalised communities in citizen-initiated police encounters. Police–citizen interactions should be understood as relational processes shaped by broader individual and collective histories. Addressing disparities, therefore, requires moving beyond interventions aimed solely at individual attitudes and towards structural reforms of the institutional and organisational conditions that shape routine encounters and reproduce symbolic inequalities in trust. Although individual encounters are unlikely to resolve these systemic divides independently, prioritising procedural justice during reactive service calls remains important, given that such interactions constitute the most common form of police-citizen contact. Their significance is further underscored by the stronger association between perceptions of procedural justice and institutional trust among non-Western respondents, a relationship that appears to be substantially mediated by socioeconomic status. Emphasising interactional fairness during these encounters may serve as a visible indicator of social recognition and institutional inclusion, thereby offering meaningful potential for strengthening institutional trust.
This study extends procedural justice research by examining ethnic and racial disparities in citizen-initiated police encounters, an underexplored but central part of everyday policing to study these disparities. This study analyses how perceived procedural justice relates to institutional trust in these interactions and contributes to the debate between the Invariance Thesis and the Asymmetry Hypothesis by assessing whether the fairness–trust relationship is consistent across groups or varies in the context of marginalisation, stigma and prior experiences that may shape sensitivity to respect and status cues. The findings of this study suggest that social categorisation processes commonly associated with police-initiated encounters may also be present in citizen-initiated contexts, despite their distinct origin in citizens’ calls for state assistance under expectations of timely and appropriate response. Finally, this study critically engages with the Dutch “Western/non-Western” differentiation as a sociopolitical boundary, situating these dynamics within broader patterns of symbolic differentiation in an urban European context.
