All cops are trusted? How context and time shape immigrants’ trust in the police in Europe

ABSTRACT

The relationship between police and ethnic minorities has been the subject of increasing interest in many Western societies in recent years. We examine first-generation immigrants’ trust in the police in Europe from a comparative and longitudinal perspective. Based on roughly 20,000 immigrants observed in 22 countries over 13 years in the European Social Survey, results show that initially high levels of trust in the police among immigrants tend to erode with the length of their stay in the host country. We show that two simultaneous processes drive this pattern: a fading reference effect (downward assimilation) and an increasing discrimination effect. Cross-national comparisons show that, on average, immigrants in countries with more police trust the police less. However, there is no effect of police size within countries, mostly because police numbers hardly change over time. We discuss implications for future research and policy development based on our findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• police
• trust
• Europe
• discrimination
• integration

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 2021 meeting of the European Consortium for Sociological Research, the IAB-ECSR Interdisciplinary Conference “Refugee Migration and Integration Revisited: Lessons from the Recent Past”, the Research Seminar at Umeå University, and the Colloquium Empirical Social Research at the University of Konstanz. We thank all discussants and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and feedback, and Subin Chang for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is likely because many immigrants, especially those who have recently migrated and those from non-Western countries, are members of ethnic minority groups. However, there are of course non-immigrant ethnic minority groups in Europe, for example the Roma, whose trust in the police is important.

2 We dropped the first two ESS waves because the Rule of Law index is only available from 2005 on.

3 We use the following editions: round 3: 3.7; round 4: 4.5; round 5: 3.4; round 6: 2.4; round 7: 2.2; round 8: 2.2; round 9: 3.1

4 https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world-research-methodology

5 An alternative would be the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which is used by, for example, Nägel and Vera (2021). However, we explicitly chose the Rule of Law measure because, in contrast to the CPI, it is quite close to the concept of procedural justice, as its four components are directly connected to policing and the justice system.

6 Code is available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BWXEA

7 Note that estimating the effects of discrimination and minority status in the same model might lead to overcontrol bias. As the correlation between both variables is not very large, results are very similar when we exclude the respective other variable from the model (discrimination interaction = −0.1, p = 0.012; minority interaction = −0.12, p = 0.001).

8 As an alternative test, we re-ran the models including natives as well as first- and second-generation immigrants. These results replicate Röder and Mühlau (2012): first-generation immigrants trust the police more than natives, second-generation immigrants trust the police less than natives (both with p < 0.01). However, there is no statistically significant interaction between immigrant status and national police force size.