Age and Race Deference Reversals: Extending Turk on Police-Citizen Conflict

Abstract

Turk's theory of norm resistance describes how authority relations can be structured in ways that hold different probabilities of overt conflict between subjects and authorities. His theory is premised on social norms of deference. This article develops Turk's argument by advancing hypotheses about how deference by race and age reinforces or undermines the positional authority of police and affects the probability of conflict with citizens. Domestic disturbance cases in which police-citizen conflict occurred are contrasted with a systematic sample of domestic cases in which no conflict is recorded. The authors find that resistance is more likely when race and age deference norms counter the positional authority of officers. These reversals predict conflict even after controls are introduced into a multivariate model.