| Justice is the spiritual aspiration of people passed down from generation to generation,as well as their vision and expectation of a better life.Procedural justice theory revolves around legitimacy to explore the authority of police or law enforcement officers,and serves the construction of a public self-driven social management model with its independent value.This study attempts to take the politeness strategies used by law enforcement officers according to politeness theory as the entry point and put their negotiation conversations with the illegally operating fruit stall owner and his families in the documentary film City Dreams under the microscope to investigate how law enforcement officers can ensure procedural justice and satisfy the four core ingredients of procedural justice: respect,trust,voice,and neutrality while adhering to strict law enforcement,so as to take an interdisciplinary approach to some extent extends the application framework of procedural justice theory,enriches the application scenarios of politeness theory when law enforcement officers are the subjects of face-threatening actions,and provides alternative references for subsequent training of police or law enforcement officers.Law enforcement officers should be the embodiment of justice and the leaders who stick to justice,which is one of the reasons why procedural justice theory was developed.Law enforcement officers not only are required to make decisions,but also to make reasonable and scientific decisions that are in the best interest of the public;not only are they required to enforce the law,but also to do so with professionalism,respect,sincerity,wisdom,and trustworthy motives,etc.In this light,this study attempts to transcribe the interaction between the law enforcement officers and the owner of the illegal fruit stall and his families in the case study documentary City Dreams by using a qualitative research method to investigate how the law enforcement officers negotiate with the stall owner and his families and what politeness strategies they employ to ensure procedural justice in the most realistic scenario possible.Overall,this study attempts to address three questions.(1)What specific politeness strategies have law enforcement officers employed in their dealings with the fruit stall owner and his family?(2)How do these politeness strategies feature in the distribution of the four elements of fulfilling procedural justice?(3)How are politeness strategies employed by law enforcement officers constrained in fulfilling the four elements of procedural justice?This study has drawn the following major conclusions around the above research questions.To begin with,by transcribing the conversations between the law enforcement officers and the fruit stall owner and his family in the documentary City Dreams,and working from a list of politeness strategies employed by the law enforcement officers,this study discovered that the law enforcement officers used a series of positive politeness strategies to seek common understanding with the fruit stall owner and his families and to satisfy their positive face needs of wanting to be recognized,understood,supported,and respected in the group;while the law enforcement officers also employed a series of negative politeness strategies,aiming to give them space for independent judgment and to satisfy their negative face needs of having independent territory,free will to decide,not being disturbed and not being forced.But in general,the law enforcement officers employed more positive politeness strategies in dealing with this issue,which can be traced back to the emphasis on kinship and family relationships in Chinese politeness.Besides,through the application of politeness strategies in the conversations between the law enforcement officers and the illegally occupying fruit stall owner and his familes,we can observe that the application of timely and effective politeness strategies by the law enforcement officers can,to a certain extent,reflect the requirements of the four ingredients of procedural justice theory: respect,voice,trustworthiness and neutrality,while adhering to strict law enforcement.However,this does not guarantee that all politeness strategies can satisfy the four key requirements of procedural justice at the same time.Most of the politeness strategies,basically,can satisfy the respect and trustworthiness factors of procedural justice,while the remaining two,namely neutrality and voice can be accomplished in few strategies.Generally speaking,law enforcement officers can employ these politeness strategies in the process of impartial law enforcement,which is still conducive to the occurrence of procedural justice,thus strengthening the legitimacy of law enforcement officers in the public’s mind and causing law enforcement officers to have more authority,and the public is more willing to cooperate with law enforcement officers and comply with the law.In addition,this study identified that three of the five strategies available to deal with face-threatening actions are no longer recommended.Due to the consideration of the professional peculiarities of law enforcement officers and the various dimensions of the society’s demand for professionalism of law enforcement officers,law enforcement officers,in either directly abstaining from committing such face-threatening actions or using the off-record strategy to implicitly express such face-threatening actions by innuendo and other means,or the strategy of completely ignoring the public’s emotional needs to accomplish the purpose of law enforcement will also reduce the legitimacy of the police in the public’s mind in the long run.For this reason,this study found that when the subject changed to law enforcement officers,the strategies to deal with face threatening actions also changed accordingly,and law enforcement officers were more inclined to use positive face strategies with redressive actions as well as negative face strategies,so as to insist on strict law enforcement while mitigating the potential threat to the public caused by face threatening actions to a certain extent.In this way,the potential threat of face threatening behavior to the public can be mitigated to some extent while maintaining strict enforcement.In the end,compared with the analysis approaches such as interviews,questionnaires,and ethnographic analysis,this study puts the conversations between law enforcement officers and the public under the microscope by exploring the politeness strategies employed by which we can observe intuitively how law enforcement officers flexibly handle various emergency situations and ensure procedural justice.This interdisciplinary approach can provide a reference path for exploring procedural justice theory and,to a certain extent,expand the analytical framework for studying procedural justice theory.In contrast to the traditional view that resorts to people’s fear and avoidance of punishment and forces people to obey laws and maintain social order,procedural justice theory tries to explicate the problem from another direction,asserting that people choose to consciously obey the law because they perceive the law and law enforcement officers are legitimate.Legitimacy gives rise to cooperation and breeds obedience,uniting people from all over the world across different cultures to stand together under the banner of law.On this basis,this study takes the politeness theory as the entry point to explore the politeness strategies employed by the law enforcement officers in the conversations with the fruit stall owner and his family in the case documentary,and thus satisfies the four key elements of respect,neutrality,trustworthiness and voice,which makes the public voluntarily submit to the management and maintain order,thus forming a self-motivated and sustainable social management model. |
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