Journal article
A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy
K Peyton, M Sierra-Arévalo, DG Rand
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | Published : 2019
Abstract
Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police–public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do posi..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We thank M. Stagnaro for his contributions to conceptualizing the project and M. Stagnaro and A. Coppock for their contributions to a pilot survey experiment conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2017 that was used to facilitate outcome selection and survey design for the field study. This project would not have been possible without the support and enthusiasm of many individuals at the New Haven Police Department past and present. We give special thanks to Chief A. Campbell, Chief L. Casanova, Lt. M. Colon, N. Pastore, Chief O. Reyes, Lt. H. Sharp, S. Spell, and Lt. D. Zannelli. We thank J. Dovidio, G. Grossman, J. Hacker, G. Huber, H. Jefferson, R. Johnston, J. Kalla, A. Papachristos, L. Peer, F. Savje, and T. Tyler for helpful comments and feedback. This research was presented and benefited from feedback at the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, the New York University Experimental Political Science Conference, the Harvard Experimental Political Science Conference, the 77th Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, and the Law and Society Association 2019 Annual Meeting. K. P. acknowledges funding from the Field Experiments Initiative at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.