Spillover: Policing, Legitimacy, and Local Government

• In Event: Stop-and-Frisk Research

Abstract

Even though policing is, in a Weberian sense, one of the core functions of the state, it remains an understudied area in political science. In a liberal democratic polity, the use and misuse of policing power and its broader political impact should be of prime concern to scholars of power and government. A small, but growing, literature in this area has found that concentrated policing has a negative impact on political participation and willingness to contact government officials for assistance. This paper extends the research on the spillover impact of concentrated policing to the study of political institutions and local government. Leveraging a recent large-N representative survey of Chicagoans in 2016, I find that not only does negative contact with the police lower residents’ trust in the police department, it also lowers their trust in the Mayor and other local elites. These findings suggest that the use of aggressive policing strategies such as stop and frisk erode citizens’ trust in local government, making it harder for elected officials to perform their core functions. Thus, I argue that concentrated policing undermines democratic responsiveness: not only through dampening political participation, but also by fostering increased citizen mistrust of local government.

Author

• Denzel Avant, Northwestern University