Investigating the Level of Impact of Police Accountability on Enhancing Public’s Satisfaction with the Restorative Justice Approach (Case study: Greater Tehran Police Stations)

Accountability is one of the requirements of any organization to stay in the field of competition and gain the trust of relevant stakeholders. Accountability in organizations such as the police, which is part of the criminal justice cycle, is more effective, more durable, and less costly if it is based on remedial methods. The present study aims to assess the impact of the level of accountability based on the restorative approach on the satisfaction of clients referring to police stations.

The present research method in terms of data is quantitative, and in terms of applied objectives and nature is of correlational type. The statistical population of the present study includes 25 + clients holding high school diploma or higher and working with one of the state organizations or private companies; and on 23 August, 6 September and 21 September 2018, referred to seven police stations in Greater Tehran and  were selected through cluster sampling. Simple random sampling method was used based on Morgan table, and 322 out of about 2000 people who referred to selected police stations in six days in connection with court cases were selected. A researcher-made questionnaire based on theoretical foundations was used as assessment tool in the present study. The validity of the instrument is calculated by Cronbach's alpha and its value is 0. 85. The indicators introduced by Klein (2011) have been used to confirm its validity. The present data was analyzed by regression and paired t-test in SPSS 22 package.

The findings indicate that professional accountability, organizational accountability, sovereignty (political) accountability and police legal accountability with a restorative justice approach with 0.39, 0.46, 0.32 and 0.44, respectively, as well as restorative justice training for employees has  equal to 0.76 impact on people's satisfaction. The results of the research show that while  focusing on  and  developing accountability indicators including organizational, legal, professional and sovereignty accountability; and training manner of  implementation of restorative justice methods such as mediation, holding local meetings and compromise circles via getting  help from local community, the police could enhance public's satisfaction.