Examining the COMM in COMMunity Policing: Communication Accommodation, Perception, and Trust in Law Enforcement-Suspect Encounters

Abstract

Since the 1980s, community policing has been embraced as the dominant police strategy. Thompson and Jenkins (2013) estimated that 97% of an officer’s time is spent communicatively interacting with the public, indicating a strong incentive to study how communication affects those involved in police interaction. Utilizing communication accommodation theory, this study examines the relationship between accommodation, trust, and overall perceptions of police. An experiment using hypothetical situations was conducted with 257 students at a large, southeastern university in the USA. The data indicates that accommodative behavior can lead suspects to be more trusting of an individual police officer but did not significantly affect their overall perceptions of police officers. There were mixed results related to the effects of consumption of crime television shows indicating a complex relationship between media representation, officer behavior, and trust. We argue that to improve communication between officers and suspects, we need to look beyond the community policing principle, and examine the key communication behaviors that help officers build trust with suspects and more generally in their communities.