Police-community Relations Research Articles

EQUALITY IN THE STREETS Using Proportionality Analysis to Regulate Street Policing

EQUALITY IN THE STREETS Using Proportionality Analysis to Regulate Street Policing

Reaching and engaging people: Analyzing tweeting practices of large U.S. police departments pre- and post- the killing of George Floyd.

Finding ways to improve police legitimacy and police-community relations has for long been an important social issue in the United States. It becomes particularly urgent following the murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020. An emerging area that holds potential in remediating police-community relations pertains to the use of social media by police. Yet, this body of research stays highly exploratory (e.g., case studies based on a small sample of agencies) and different viewpoints exist regarding the objectives of police social media usage. The current study identified 115 large police departments in the U.S. and collected their tweets over a 4-month period between 4/1/2020 and 7/31/2020. We investigated how police agencies (both individually and as an aggregate) leveraged social media to respond to the nationwide protests directed at the police and community reactions to such responses. We found that police agencies tweeted more frequently in the immediate aftermath of the murder and posted an increased number of civil-unrest related tweets. The public showed a greater interest in engaging with law enforcement agencies (i.e., average favorite and retweet counts) following the murder. A great variability emerged across agencies in their responses on social media, suggesting that examining only a handful of agencies or a particular dimension of social media usage would limit our understanding of police behaviors and citizen interactions on social media. In conclusion, we suggested a few avenues for future research (and practices) on responsible and effective use of social media by police, while pointing out the challenges associated with such inquiries.

Examining the nuance in adolescents' police encounters: Positive, negative, or both?

Youth-police encounters reflect a pivotal point for intervention to improve police-community relations. Data from 454 youths (M = 15.1 years) included brief written descriptions of positive and negative experiences with a police officer and perceptions of police using Likert-scale items. Participating youths described both positive (46%) and negative (60%) experiences with police. Besides decidedly positive experiences, youths also responded to the positive experiences prompt with ambiguous situations (46%) that involved the arrest of the youth or their family (procedural or distributive justice). Examples of ambiguous self-described positive experiences included, "Restraining order,""My dad went to prison,"and "When I was arrested in location redacted, the officer was kind and didn't put me in cuffs."Results from regressions indicated youths' perceptions of police were more often associated with the absence of positive experiences than specific positive or negative experiences. Study findings have implications for police trainings and future research on youth-police encounters.

Police–community relations, excessive force, and community stress: Evidence from a community survey.

Police–community relations, excessive force, and community stress: Evidence from a community survey.

“It Just Makes You Have More Problems”: An Examination of Anti-snitching Codes among Black Youths in Toronto

Subcultural codes against compliance with the police, or “snitching,” have factored prominently in public and law enforcement discourses related to urban violence and crime prevention. However, scholarship on these issues focuses almost entirely on the United States. This study investigates attitudes toward compliance with the police and perceptions of snitching among a sample of a Black youths who reside in socially and economically marginalized neighbourhoods in Toronto. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews, I examine how perceptions of community safety and experiences with policing have impacted young people’s willingness to report crimes and comply with police investigations. Contrary to popular discourses, being seen speaking with police or providing information did not necessarily constitute snitching. Rather, consistent with prior research, a complex set of variables, including age, gender, and the perceived seriousness of the crime, all factored in determining what constituted snitching and when someone was considered a snitch. My findings challenge the essentializing nature of popular discourses on snitching while also highlighting how diminished perceptions of police legitimacy and efficacy have impacted young people’s willingness to report crimes and comply with police investigations. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings for efforts to reform the police and improve police–community relations.

Halo effects and public evaluation of police service

ABSTRACT Public opinion of police service provides important guidelines for government leaders and policy practitioners who strive to improve police-community relations and restructure law enforcement agencies. Despite its widespread use, citizen evaluation of police service is bias-prone due to the subjective nature of people’s judgment heuristics. Considering that the impact of police actions on public opinion is not limited to those that police directly deal with, this study examines whether people’s general impression on the police plays a role in how they rate smaller traits of police. To this end, the present study revisits Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues’ Police Services Study conducted in Rochester, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Findings show that citizens’ overall perception on police service creates a halo, which positively influences their subsequent appraisals of police courtesy, equal treatment, and honesty, respectively. This study ultimately underscores the nuanced understanding of police service information reported from citizen surveys.

Citizen Complaints as an Accountability Mechanism: Uncovering Patterns Using Topic Modeling

ObjectivesCitizen complaints are considered by policing researchers as an indicator of police misconduct, and a proxy of police-community relations. Nevertheless, US and EU-based studies tend to focus on sustained complaints as reported by official agencies and officer-based correlates. Using the case of Carabineros, the Chilean militarized police force, this study examines (a) latent topics contained in a large set of complaints against the police on a digital platform, and (b) the change of those topics across time and (c) by complainants’ educational level.MethodsWe use novel computational natural language processing techniques to identify latent themes across the corpus of complaints ( N = 1,623), hosted on an online forum from 2013 to 2020.ResultsOur findings show eight latent themes across the corpus. Among others, these themes were related to police effectiveness, police misbehavior, and a master frame of institutional crisis that has significantly grown over the last year. Additionally, differences in the prevalence of topics by complainants’ educational level were also found.ConclusionsOur findings contribute to the enterprise of opening the black box of complaints against the police and highlighting opportunities for social accountability in a developing country.

Police department websites and digital language accessibility: a platform for achieving effective communication between limited English proficient communities and the police

ABSTRACT Police departments are increasingly relying on technology to strengthen community-police relations, and yet there exists little research on the ways police departments use digital platforms to meet the needs of those requiring language services. In this study we use the innovative methodology of website content analysis (WebCA) to evaluate the websites of the fifty largest police departments in the U.S. for the presence of digital language accessibility, a novel measure that captures a police department’s efforts to make its programmes and services digitally accessible to people who are limited English proficient (LEP). WebCA expands on a general content analysis by drawing on methodological approaches from sociology, communications, and linguistics while accounting for the unique ways information is generated in digital spaces (e.g. images, features, links, and more) (Herring, S.C., 2010. Web content analysis: expanding the paradigm. In: J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, and M. Allen, eds. International Handbook of internet research. Dordrecht: Springer, 233–249). Our results suggest that police departments have largely synonymised digital language accessibility with machine translation – a response that arguably falls short of meaningful access. We use the findings from this study to offer practical suggestions for how police departments can more effectively communicate with LEP communities. Commitment to community policing requires both open and effective communication. As police departments embrace digital platforms to strengthen open communication, we argue that they ought to prioritise digital language accessibility as a way of establishing effective communication.

Losing Hearts and Minds: Civil Conflict, Counterinsurgency Policing and Postwar Crime in Insurgent Strongholds

ABSTRACT Postwar countries often experience high levels of crime. A frequent explanation is that these countries exhibit inefficient and illegitimate state security apparatuses that cannot enforce law and order, and that contribute to an environment conducive to crime. Theoretical arguments outlining how an environment conducive to crime comes about as consequences of armed conflict have remained generic and empirical evidence is scant. Building on theoretical insights from the micro dynamics of civil wars, counterinsurgency policing and environmental criminology, this study makes a contribution by theoretically developing and empirically exploring how local conflict dynamics in insurgent strongholds shape police-community relations in a way that undermines the extent to which the police can handle crime in a postwar context. The suggested causal process is explored in the context of West Belfast (Northern Ireland) from 1969–2008. The analysis indicates overall support for it, though with important nuances.

Officer Trust Towards Community Members and Critical Incidents: a Comparison of Factors.

Current scholarship suggests attention should be focused on differences in specific job-related conditions to understand help-seeking behavior among police officers. This project examines how officers’ feelings of department satisfaction and on-the-job emotions may be associated with trust in members of the community they police. Specifically, officers were asked to report trust levels both in a general sense and in the context of a potential officer-involved shooting (OIS) incident. Print and electronic surveys were completed by 169 police officers across 9 agencies located in 5 New Jersey counties between September 2019 and March 2020. Survey questions covered frequency of on-the-job emotions, satisfaction with department administration, and knowledge of local culture. Bivariate comparisons show officers’ levels of both general and post-OIS community trust significantly differ based on reported frequency of emotion, assessment of job satisfaction and department administration, and wider cultural context. Furthermore, multivariate analyses indicate significant factors associated with trust levels include frequency of both positive (fulfillment) and negative (frustration) emotions, satisfaction with training, and attitudes towards the importance of understanding local culture. Findings suggest the complexity of police–community relationships should be more fully explored in relation to supporting aspects of job-related mental wellness in police officers.

The impact of police–community relations: Recruitment and retention concerns of local police agencies

Abstract Recently, there has been a growing movement across the USA to defund police. Additionally, police agencies have faced a rapidly declining application pool. Fewer applicants combined with retention issues have led to staffing concerns and cultural impacts within departments. This study examines the recruitment and retention problems faced by a local police agency in response to struggles within police–community relations and calls to defund police nationwide. Three series of interviews were conducted among new hires in training, new hires post training, and voluntary departures. Findings from this study indicate three primary categories of themes effecting both recruitment and retention: support, operational standards and compensation, and transparency. Based on the findings, several policy implications should be considered to improve recruitment and retention within the department. These include developing a comprehensive website for candidates and current officers, adjusting personnel shift rotation, overhauling the Field Training Programme, and working to improve support.

Influencing Police and Community Relations in Abu Dhabi with a Soft Power Approach during COVID-19

Abstract Soft power policing is emerging as the policing catch phrase in 2021 in part arising from multiple police–community relations challenges gaining an increasing public focus globally. This article presents the soft power approach to policing engaged by Abu Dhabi police pre- and during the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the underpinning strategies and initiatives deployed to sustain community trust and confidence levels in Abu Dhabi Police. A review of global indexes promotes Abu Dhabi Police as a world leader in police–community relations, an achievement sustained throughout the COVID-19 global crisis. This research explores the ways in which achievements are impacted by a sustained and an all-encompassing policing approach that places soft power at the centre of police and community relations.

Does Police Use of Twitter Align With and Enhance Community Policing Objectives? An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s Twitter Activity

Prior research has examined how social media has been integrated into law enforcement operations; however, this research has not fully explored the potential for this technology to function as an effective community policing strategy. Through the creation of a uniquely large dataset constructed with individual “tweets,” the current study analyzed Twitter use by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in 2016. Using a mixed-methods approach, this research identified linkages between social media and community policing, the level of adherence to community policing objectives, the potential for heterogeneity in usage across different NYPD patrol boroughs, and the degree of public engagement. Our findings suggest Twitter is inimitably positioned to contribute to each aspect of community policing, although its effectiveness varied across dimension typology. Second, heterogeneity was also observed across patrol boroughs, indicating both the objectives and application of social media varies within the agency. Lastly, engagement metrics reveal a few notable trends concerning police-community relations.

A Reasonable Officer: Examining the Relationships Among Stress, Training, and Performance in a Highly Realistic Lethal Force Scenario.

Under conditions of physiological stress, officers are sometimes required to make split-second life-or-death decisions, where deficits in performance can have tragic outcomes, including serious injury or death and strained police–community relations. The current study assessed the performance of 122 active-duty police officers during a realistic lethal force scenario to examine whether performance was affected by the officer’s level of operational skills training, years of police service, and stress reactivity. Results demonstrated that the scenario produced elevated heart rates (i.e., 150 beats per minute), as well as perceptual and cognitive distortions, such as tunnel vision, commensurate with those observed in naturalistic use of force encounters. The average performance rating from the scenario was 59%, with 27% of participants making at least one lethal force error. Elevated stress reactivity was a predictor of poorer performance and increased lethal force errors. Level of training and years of police service had differential and complex effects on both performance and lethal force errors. Our results illustrate the need to critically reflect on police training practices and continue to make evidence-based improvements to training. The findings also highlight that while training may significantly improve outcomes, flawless performance is likely not probable, given the limits of human performance under stress. Implications for the objective reasonableness standard, which is used to assess the appropriateness of force in courts of law, are discussed.

How the interplay between organisational ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ shapes police officers’ perceptions of community policing

This article draws on interview data and the concepts of organisational ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ to critically assess police officers’ perceptions of community policing in one English constabulary. In so doing, it considers the cultural, organisational and wider contextual determinants of officers’ alignment to this style of police work. With an emphasis on developing community partnerships and engaging in problem-solving, rather than enforcement of the criminal law, community policing has been seen a primary way of rendering officers more ‘responsive’ to the needs of citizens, improving police–community relations and driving down crime rates. An important reform movement in police organisations around the world, the success of community policing nonetheless depends on officers’ willingness and ability to deliver it. Accordingly, the generation of evidence about the ‘drivers’ of officers’ attitudes to inform strategies to promote the delivery of the approach is essential. Findings suggest that officers value community policing as an organisational strategy but that the approach maintains a low status and is undervalued compared with other specialisms within the organisation. This is born of an organisational culture that foregrounds law enforcement as the primary function of police work and an organisational climate that reinforces it. This has implications for community officers in terms of their perceptions of and attitudes towards the approach, self-esteem and sense of value and worth, perceptions of organisational justice, discretionary effort and role commitment. Recommendations for police managers are set out.

Policing the coronavirus pandemic: Nigeria police senior officers’ views on preparedness, response, legitimacy and post-COVID policing

In the wake of pandemic policing occasioned by COVID-19, Nigeria police have been facing challenges of a lack of legitimacy, together with what is termed the militarization of police operations. This has impacted considerably on police–community relations. Meanwhile, early reports on the police response to the pandemic indicated high levels of lockdown violation, despite adoption of a militarized option in the enforcement of restriction orders. In reviewing one of the first police interventions on a public health crisis in Nigeria, a qualitative study was conducted among top-ranking police officers who supervised the enforcement of lockdown and other COVID-19 measures. Sixteen interviews were conducted and a thematic analysis of the narratives was carried out. Police unpreparedness for public health interventions, and public resistance to the use of repressive, force-led styles of policing were identified as major impediments to positive pandemic policing. Therefore, police officers are advised to ensure the application of procedurally just practices in their interactions with the public.

A Study on Decentralized Policing focused on PCR(Police Community Relationship)

A Study on Decentralized Policing focused on PCR(Police Community Relationship)

Confirmation bias: A barrier to community policing

This is a very challenging time for police–community relations, one characterized by a mutual lack of trust between police and citizens. But trust is an important tenet of effective community policing. Trust between police and communities can result in better problem solving, fewer legal violations by citizens, less frequent use of force by the police, less resistance by citizens during arrests, greater willingness to share information, less inclination to riot, and greater willingness of community members and police to cooperate. One key obstacle to fostering trust between the community and police is confirmation bias—the tendency for people to take in information and process it in a way that confirms their current preconceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. Recognizing and addressing confirmation bias, therefore, plays a critical role in fostering more productive engagement. If we are to improve police–community relations and co-create a way forward, learning to approach debates with open minds, an awareness of the lens of our own perspectives, commitment to considering the opposite, and the goal of listening with curiosity are essential.

A systems framework depicting how complex neighborhood dynamics and contextual factors could impact the effectiveness of an alcohol outlet zoning policy.

An updated zoning policy eliminating all alcohol outlets (liquor stores) in residential districts was implemented to reduce high rates of violent crime in Baltimore City. Diverse stakeholders were engaged in group model building (GMB) activities to develop causal loop diagrams (CLDs) that elucidate the impact of the new zoning policy on crime, and more broadly, the potentially unintended social and environmental consequences of the policy. Three distinct groups, community advocates, city officials/academics, and community residents, participated in three separate GMB sessions. Three CLDs, one from each stakeholder group, were created to depict the possible outcomes of the zoning policy. Our findings offer insight into potential unintended consequences of removing liquor stores from residential areas that may undermine the policy. Community members described the need for additional supports related to mental health and substance use, opportunities for investment in the community, access to other goods and services, and community-police relations to ensure the policy achieved its intended goal of reducing violent crime. Our findings highlight the importance of timely engagement of local stakeholders to understand how complex neighborhood dynamics and contextual factors could impact the effectiveness of a zoning policy change.

R. Deuchar, V. Crichlow, and S. Fallik (2021). Police-Community Relations in Times of Crisis: Decay and Reform in the Post-Furguson Era

R. Deuchar, V. Crichlow, and S. Fallik (2021). Police-Community Relations in Times of Crisis: Decay and Reform in the Post-Furguson Era