Building Trust in State Actors: A Multi-Site RCT with Colombia’s National Police

• In Event: The Politics of Public Security in Latin America

Abstract

State actors frequently confront trust deficits among citizens, hindering effective service delivery. This paper assesses whether improving bureaucrats' practices can increase citizens' trust in them. We study a hard case: following protests that eroded trust in the Colombian National Police, we experimentally evaluate whether retraining officers in procedural justice principles while increasing police-citizen interactions improved citizens' attitudes towards the police. Across five large cities in Colombia, we find positive effects on trust, willingness-to-pay for police services, and perceptions of fair treatment by officers, with no impacts on crime. Unexpectedly, officers' beliefs regarding the completeness and utility of procedural justice training declined among treated officers, perhaps due to increased awareness of the need for better training, or a mismatch with their performance assessments, which focus mostly on crime prevalence. Results are similar across baseline levels of trust, poverty, and crime.

Authors

• Michael Lee Weintraub, Universidad de los Andes

• Santiago Tobon, Universidad EAFIT