Baton Rouge Blue: Exploring Predictors of Trust in the Police

• In Event: Roundtable: Efforts to Engage with Urban Bias in Neighborhood Studies of Crime

Abstract

The interaction between communities and law enforcement is influenced by several factors, including historical context, neighborhood structural characteristics, and perceptions of police conduct. Procedural justice theory suggests that individuals are more likely to have higher levels of trust in the Police when they perceive fairness and have opportunities for participation in decision-making processes. This study contributes to the existing knowledge of police-community relations by analyzing data from the Baton Rouge Social Survey. Specifically, this study examines the impact of social capital, such as social trust and civic engagement, and neighborhood characteristics, such as concentrated disadvantage, on trust in law enforcement. This involved a multilevel regression analysis of trust in the police with the individual characteristics such as race, age, gender, education, income and marital status and social capital as level 1 variables and the neighborhood characteristics such as concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, and neighborhood crime rates as level two variables. The findings will contribute to knowledge on the relationship between Police and the public, while highlighting the importance of social capital in shaping trust in police, an area that few studies have been able to explore.

Author

• Joy Njeh, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University