Attitudes Toward Police: Who Participates in Collaboration with Police and Why?

• In Event: Legitimacy and Attitudes Toward the Police

Abstract

During past three decades, community policing which stresses the collaboration between community and police to prevent and solve the problems has become a widespread police strategy in the nation. Many research attempted to assess its effectiveness through simple connection with crime rate, but few research have focused on the support of the police that comes from resident participation, a key element of community policing. This study will use multiple data sources to investigate the hypothesized support from citizens and participants of community-police communication meetings. More specifically, the three datasets include: 1) a random telephone survey of public attitudes toward police collected from 1500 citizens in Houston, TX in 2010, 2) a survey of 277 participants who attended community-police meetings in 2011 resident (1st wave) and a proposed survey of approximately 500 (2nd wave) community-police communication meeting participants. With a comparison of three datasets, this study attempts to expand our knowledge to public attitudes toward the police between ordinary residents and participants of police sponsored meetings. Finally, this study offers policy relevant information on how to make public participation in crime prevention and collaboration effectively.

Authors

• Jae-Seung Lee, Sam Houston State University

• Jihong Solomon Zhao, Sam Houston State University