Institutional Origins of Trust in the Police

• In Event: Inside the Black Box: Police, Politics, and Communities

Abstract

Police are commonly the front-line bureaucrats that represent the face of the state in daily interactions with civilians. But in many countries, the “police” do not enforce the law as a unified force but rather are represented by multiple institutions with overlapping jurisdictions and roles. In these instances, civilians encounter a fragmented set of agencies that are charged with investigating crimes, making arrests, and generally providing for local order. We argue that this fragmentation can reduce civilian trust in the police by increasing principal-agent problems in government oversight of law enforcement agencies. Fragmented police institutions can suffer from significant principal-agent problems that impede coordinated action, undermine information sharing, and enable agents to pursue their own interests, resulting in less effective and more corrupt policing. In turn, ineffective and corrupt police behaviors are likely to undermine civilian trust in the police. We test these expectations with an original cross-national dataset that captures the fragmentation of policing in over 100 developing countries (the Police Force Organization Dataset (PFOD)) from 2000 to 2015. We combine our PFOD with nationally representative survey data on trust in the police taken from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. We find that countries with a larger number of police forces are associated with significantly lower levels of trust in the police. Meanwhile, the presence of local police agencies (i.e. those overseen by local government) or specialized police (i.e. special forces and gendarmeries) are not associated with higher civilian trust in the police. Our results suggest that unifying disparate police forces may have a better chance of cultivating cooperative and trusting relationships with civilians rather than creating an increasing number of separate specialized forces. This finding also has implications for widespread debates about police reform that aim to improve policing by enhancing community trust and cooperation, even as many countries exhibit increasingly militarized law enforcement. Finally, we also plan to draw on original surveys in Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico to further investigate how and why citizen trust varies between local and national police forces.

Authors

• David Andres Dow, Naval Postgraduate School

• Aila M. Matanock, University of California, San Diego

• Leonardo R. Arriola, University of California, Merced