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ABSTRACT
The role of police in building collective efficacy remains an unanswered question. This paper employs a sample of 4403 people living in 148 neighbourhoods in Brisbane, Australia, to examine the relationship between perceptions of police and collective efficacy. Results indicate that even when controlling for neighbourhood compositional and structural characteristics, trust in police effectiveness and procedural justice are the key variables explaining collective efficacy. Although trust in police effectiveness and procedural justice do not predict neighbourhood differences in collective efficacy, they do explain variations in perceptions of collective efficacy among those residents in a given neighbourhood. These findings reveal that when people trust the police are effective and procedurally just, they are more likely to view their neighbourhoods as collectively efficacious. This research suggests that police can help to encourage collective efficacy, and potentially reduce crime, by communicating their effectiveness and delivering procedural justice to citizens.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Queensland Police Service (QPS) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) for their support in the collection of these data. The author would also like to thank Professor Lorraine Mazerolle and Dr Rebecca Wickes for their feedback on earlier drafts and Dr Renee Zahnow for collating the crime data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Elise Sargeant is a University of Queensland (UQ) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) in Queensland, Australia. Elise has a background in survey/interview design and research using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Elise teaches survey methodology to postgraduate students and currently works as an Associate Investigator on the Australian Community Capacity Study Wave 3 survey and the Queensland Community Engagement Trial. Her research interests include police legitimacy, attitudes to police, neighbourhoods and the ecology of crime.
Notes
1. I also note that a lack of police legitimacy and trust may be linked to vigilantism, when police are illegitimate and ineffective, community residents may revolt and solve problems through the use of violence (Black Citation1983, Tankebe Citation2009, Haas et al. Citation2014). However, as collective efficacy is associated with pro-social action, it is more likely that the relationship between police legitimacy, trust and collective efficacy will be positive (Silver and Miller Citation2004).
2. In Australia, the term ‘suburb' is similar to the use of the term ‘neighbourhood' or ‘local community' used to describe a geographically bounded unit of analysis (Chaskin Citation2001). The suburb also fits with Brisbane residents’ notions of their local community. For example, in a pilot study, ACCS researchers found that respondents associated the term ‘community' with their residential suburb (Mazerolle et al. Citation2010). In addition, the suburb is the smallest unit of analysis for which the ACCS could obtain administrative data at the time of data collection (Mazerolle et al. Citation2012). As such, the suburb is considered the best geographic boundary for the purposes of this study.
3. The discrepancy between the response rates between the main sample and the ethnic booster sample is likely attributable to the sampling design. In the main sample, a proportion of participants were longitudinal participants who had completed a similar survey some years earlier. These participants were subsequently more likely to agree to participate in a follow-up survey than the booster sample participants who received ‘cold calls’. Overall, lower response rates reflect the recent trend for telephone surveys (for example, Pickett et al. Citation2012).
4. Cluster means were also calculated for each of the key variables of interest (police effectiveness, procedural justice and the obligation to obey police), to test for contextual effects. Individual-level measures of these policing constructs were then cluster-mean centered to allow different within and between effects and to avoid issues of multicollinearity (Raudenbush Citation1989, Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal Citation2012). Upon entry into the statistical models tests were computed to determine whether or not the resultant coefficients for individual and cluster-mean measures of each construct were the same. Test statistics indicated that for each of trust in police effectiveness, trust in procedural justice and the obligation to obey police, there was no difference between the within- and between-effects. As such only individual-level policing variables were entered in the final models.
5. Rates of violent crime are a good indicator of crime in a neighbourhood, as violent crime is more often reported than other types of crime (Mazerolle et al. Citation2012).
6. To improve model fit, error terms were covaried for ‘If a group of community children were skipping school and hanging around on a street corner, how likely is it that people in your community would do something about it?' and ‘If some children were spray painting graffiti on a local building, how likely is it that people in your community would do something about it?' as well as for ‘People in this community are willing to help their neighbours' and ‘This is a close-knit community'. Theoretically, we might expect these error terms to be correlated in that skipping school and graffiti may go hand in hand in communities, as would being willing to help one's neighbours and living in a close-knit community.
7. Empty multi-level models predicting trust in police effectiveness, trust in procedural justice and the obligation to obey police were computed, demonstrating this low variation. ICCs were 3.5%, 2% and 1% for trust in police effectiveness, trust in procedural justice and the obligation to obey police respectively.
