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Once you see the distinction between these two ideas, I think it should be clear why a
legitimacy-based approach to policing could be more fruitful in the long term. Because what
legitimacy means is that people choose to voluntarily comply with the law whereas deterrence
theory assumes, actually must assume, that there must be a sanction or someone to detect the
wrongdoer and to punish the wrongdoer in order to achieve any kind of crime reduction. This
means that deterrence is costly.I’m not saying that deterrence doesn’t work. Of course it does,
right? People obviously are going to be motivated by the threat of sanction and the imposition
of it. What’s important is that social psychologists have shown that these legitimacy-based
reasons are more important reasons to people for compliance. That is, they’re more powerful and
they last longer. Which means, if you’re trying to achieve sort of general compliance or crime
reduction in the long term, the legitimacy-based option is going to be cheaper for you.