The Role of Perceptions of the Police in Informal Social Control

Abstract

Recent research has established the importance of informal social control to a variety of aspects of neighborhood life, including the prevalence of crime. This work has described informal social control as rooted in a neighborhood's structural and social context, but has less frequently explored the interconnections between informal and formal social control efforts. Drawing on data from Seattle, this article suggests that perceptions of formal social control—specifically perceptions of police procedural injustice and police efficacy—directly influence both individual evaluations of informal social control efforts as well as neighborhood capacities for informal social control. We suggest a pragmatic mechanism to explain this relationship—that low evaluations of the police will influence perceptions of the effectiveness of and costs associated with informal social control efforts—and we control for alternative cultural explanations related to the desirability of social control. Most strikingly, we find that strong racial disparities in faith in the police help explain why neighborhoods with larger race-ethnic minority populations have lower capacities for informal social control. We conclude with a discussion of emerging accounts of the role of culture in local organizational processes and of the larger social implications of the race-ethnic stratification of perceptions of the police.