How Can the Police Avoid Earning Our Distrust?

Abstract

The American public’s distrust in the police is at a historic high. Distrust impairs the ability of the police to meet their objectives. It is therefore important to better understand how the police can avoid earning distrust. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we explore the associations of police distrust among African Americans. Americans as a group are overpoliced, but we focus on African Americans because of their especially high levels of interaction with the police bureaucracy and the damage police racial inequity has to their citizenship. If the police can avoid earning distrust with African Americans, police could avoid earning distrust with Americans broadly. We find that recent, frequent, discriminatory, and low-quality stops are associated with increased police distrust. This suggests that police can minimize earning distrust by avoiding unnecessary stops and, when stops cannot be avoided, by focusing on quality, nondiscriminatory interactions.