Correlates of Trust in Police in Latin America

• In Event: The Political Economy of the Developing World

Abstract

Citizen trust in police is thought to facilitate the cooperation between communities and police, thereby promoting public safety. Many recent policing interventions are motivated by the idea that positive interactions between citizens and police will increase citizens' trust in the police, prompting a virtuous cycle that will ultimately promote safety and security. In this paper, we argue that the implications of this transactional characterization of trust in police are descriptively inconsistent with a large body of data. We focus on citizen trust in police in Latin America, which is often classified as the world's most violent region. Drawing upon 126 unique surveys spanning 17 countries between 2004 and 2019, we show that measures of social class -- the strongest predictors of individual exposure to and treatment by police -- largely do not covary with individuals' trust in police. To measure and trace the origins of the gap between these findings and existing accounts, we implement an expert elicitation exercise to measure the prior beliefs of academic experts and activists. Finally, we show that the data are instead consistent with a new model of trust in government in which citizen trust in public institutions evolves through observation of others' interactions with the state. Our work has broad implications for the study of trust in government and for the design of policing policies to promote public safety.

Authors

• Carolina Torreblanca, University of Pennsylvania

• Tara L Slough, New York University