Applying the Cooperation Hypothesis to Examine Police Presence as a Facilitator of Informal Social Control

• In Event: Communities and Place: Perceptions and Sources of Collective Efficacy

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that what police do in neighborhoods may influence informal social control / collective efficacy. For example, in their hot spots policing experiment, Kochel and Weisburd (2018) found that crime hot spots receiving directed patrol (increased police presence) over a five-month period saw modest improvements in residents’ assessments of informal social control in their neighborhoods. The authors explained this result using the cooperation hypothesis, rationalizing that as police were spending more time in neighborhoods and as crime decreased, residents began to see police as more readily available to them, more responsive, and more effective, and thus felt more empowered to exert informal social control, knowing police were a resource to them. In a different context, Kochel (2018) found that residents living in an area with high levels of violence who reported seeing police more often felt safer than residents living in a nearby area with somewhat lower levels of violence who reported seeing police in the area less frequently. Building on these findings, the current study proposes to apply a structural equation model to map the theoretical pathways to collective action, consistent with the cooperation hypothesis, including information about police presence, crime in neighborhoods, along with residents’ perceptions.

Authors

• Tammy Rinehart Kochel, Southern Illinois University

• Jacinta Gau, University of Central Florida