Exploring public trust in policing at a community in Ghana

Abstract

Public trust in community policing plays a major role in enhancing police effort in securing peace, public safety, and crime combat. Fractured relationship between a community and the police breeds corruption and social disorderliness. This study used qualitative case study to explore public trust in community policing at a peri-urban community in Ghana using 120 landlords as respondents. The researcher used interview, triangulated with focus group and direct observation, to collect data from the subjects who freely consented to become participants of the study. The author of this paper ensured reliability of the outcome of the study using member-checking, bracketing, and rigor. A qualitative software, NVivo, aided the analysis of the data which generated three main themes. The outcome of the study revealed that lack of public trust in the community policing resulted from fear of reprisals from criminals reported to the police, poor visibility of police officers, and lack of confidence due to perceived poor performance of the police.