CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Negative Interactions with Cops Erode Trust in Police
When trust cannot be earned distrust can be avoided
Americans as a group are overpoliced, but this is especially the case for African Americans. Data from 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) shows that African Americans report being stopped by the police at a substantially higher rate than others. This disparity has the potential to influence how the public understands and experiences policing, especially in the context of ongoing policing inequity. How does this high level of police contact influence trust in the police, and do the qualities of contact also influence distrust?
Police today enter their interactions with a long history and existing reality of systemic racial inequity in policing. Race is a critical factor in policing and confidence in police among is lower Black adults than White adults. This creates conditions for African Americans to distrust police.
It can be difficult to disentangle the many factors that influence trust and distrust in the police. Prior contacts with government inform current trust/distrust, current trust/distrust inform current contacts, and past contacts will inform trust/distrust for future assessments and interactions. Thus, existing distrust makes building trust extremely challenging by informing how current interactions are seen. Generations of experience combined with the path-dependent nature of trust creates severe challenges for policing to build trust among African Americans.
Our research in the Journal of Social Equity and Public Administration examines the importance of involuntary police contact, characteristics of that contact, and distrust in the police.
We find police can minimize public distrust by avoiding unnecessary stops and focusing on quality, nondiscriminatory interactions. We find the characteristics of a contact are especially important for distrust. The first graph below shows the relationship between experiencing discrimination in a police stop and the perceived quality of the stop from the perspective of African American civilians. Those who reported discrimination were substantially more likely to report their contact as negative. The second graph below shows the relationship between police contact quality and distrust in the police with those having negative encounters reporting substantially more distrust. Taken together, this demonstrate the important effect of racial discrimination on African Americans’ distrust in the police.
However, our research also finds mere contact with the police is enough to build distrust among African Americans. This effect is most pronounced for recent contacts occurring within the past four years, demonstrating a recency bias in assessments of police distrust. The qualities of police contacts are important for police distrust including its quality, the experience of discrimination, and being punished by the criminal justice system. At the same time, controlling for these characteristics, distrust in local government in general, and demographic factors, we find that recent contact with police is sufficient to build distrust among African Americans.
When people distrust government, they are less likely to work with government, respect government, and listen to government. The benefits of trust, however, can be difficult to reap for parts of government with coercive or investigatory missions. Most of their interactions cannot be expected to build trust and may at best work to avoid building distrust. It may very well be that there are scarce ways to give a traffic citation that increases trust in the officer giving it for the person receiving it, much less the enforcement of even more serious laws against those creating detriment to public safety.
Given the nature of policing, police departments cannot always overcome the barrier between distrust and trust, but they can minimize the magnitude of distrust by avoiding unnecessary stops and providing nondiscriminatory high-quality experiences. While some police contacts are important public safety interventions, many are not. Especially given the context of racial inequity in policing, avoiding distrust may create conditions more likely to allow for building trust.
Note: Portions of this article and illustrations were reproduced from our original article published in the Journal of Social Equity and Public Administration under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
