See Something, Say Something: The Role of Legitimacy and Trust in Reporting Crimes and Potential Terrorism among Minority Communities

• In Event: Predicting Cooperation with Police and Compliance with the Law

Abstract

Why do some members of minority communities alert police to crime – specifically potential extremist violence – while others don’t? The process-based model has long been assumed as the pathway through which individuals cooperate with legal authorities. Yet, this model focuses on institutional trust and legitimacy, not interpersonal trust. Additionally, it is unclear how legitimacy and trust impact informing police about terrorism, specifically within minority and immigrant communities. I argue that the decision to alert police to crime is rational, and that rationality is bounded by views of law enforcement generally and individual officers, and cultural factors. Data for this project comes a national sample of Caucasians, African Americans and Hispanics. Using a survey-embedded experiment, I test my theory of legitimacy and trust, and examine factors that impact individual propensity to alert police to various crimes general, and terrorism specifically. Scholars have traditionally given participants a vignette about crime and asked about likelihood to report it, which can induce socially desirable answers. Instead, I gave participants a series of conjoint experiments, which force a choice of which crime to report between two options that differ on a series of theoretically relevant factors: crime type, police responsiveness, and safety in reporting.

Author

• Erin M. Kearns, American University