Resident perceptions of police mistreatment and use of force in a troubled Trinidadian neighborhood

Abstract

This study examines public perceptions of police mistreatment and use of force in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a developing Caribbean nation. This research describes residents’ perceptions of, and experiences with, police misbehavior before and after the implementation of a community-oriented policing initiative. Multivariate analyses examine whether the factors influencing perceptions of police use of excessive force varied across time. The initial results suggest that the introduction of community policing did not positively influence citizens’ views of, or experiences with, police mistreatment in this neighborhood. Results from the multivariate analyses suggest that the factors predicting public views about the frequency of excessive use of force by police did change over time. We offer several explanations for why change in residents’ views of police misbehavior did and did not occur.

Keywords:

• police
• use of force
• citizen attitudes
• Caribbean
• Trinidad and Tobago

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by the Ministry of National Security of Trinidad and Tobago. This paper reflects the opinions and conclusions of the authors alone, and does not reflect the official positions of the Ministry of National Security or any other agency or organization. This research was approved by the Human Subjects Review Board at George Mason University (HSRB Protocol #4846).

Notes

1. In addition to the POP/CP training, the Gonzales officers were to receive substantial improvements in equipment (firearms, protective vests, communications equipment, computers, etc.) and permanent access to a mobile unit. In practice, however, there were serious delays in purchasing equipment (most requests went unfulfilled) and access to the mobile unit was severely limited during the study timeframe.

2. The sampling boundaries for Gonzales were based on those identified by community residents because the boundaries of Gonzales are debated. The official boundaries from the Port of Spain Corporation and Central Statistical Office used for statistical purposes are smaller than the boundaries identified by community residents (see Pride in Gonzales Committee 2005). Gonzales was then split into eight zones (chosen to reflect smaller neighborhoods within the community), and the sample was drawn proportional to the population in each zone. In order to select respondents, GIS maps for each area were generated showing roads and housing. A start house was located and a sampling interval calculated so that interviewers canvassed every ‘nth’ house from the start location. Once the household was identified, adult respondents in each household were selected using the ‘last birthday’ method to ensure that the probability of selecting an individual in the household was the same for all eligible respondents. If selected participants were not at home, interviewers made three call backs before the case was coded as a non-response using AAPOR final distribution code 2.25 (American Association for Public Opinion Research 2008).

3. English is the official language in Trinidad, so language translation of survey items was unnecessary. However, colloquial terms differ across cultures, and we wanted to capture these in the survey.

4. Due to persistent and widespread fear and mistrust of the police, some residents refused to answer survey questions that asked about police corruption or misbehavior. For this reason, the rate of missing data on these three questions is higher than for other topics on the survey.

5. Given the change in predictors from wave 1 to wave 2, we tested for an interaction between serious crime problem and police effectiveness in each of the models. The interaction was not significant.