https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5867-4129
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ABSTRACT
Cultivating positive human interactions is at the core of many strategies used to strengthen the relationship between police and community members, with the use of criminal justice architecture being an emergent strategy. This study employs a survey experiment to examine police station design as a strategy to improve police-community relationships and the interactive effect of an individual’s previous encounters with police officers. Study results show that the impact of welcoming police station designs on emotions and behaviourally-relevant perceptions are moderated by intrusive encounters with police officers. Specifically, analyses reveal that people with previous arrest experiences respond more positively when confronted with a welcoming police station design compared to persons without an arrest history. Subgroup analyses further yield variation across Black and White racial groups based on previous encounters with police. Together, the symbol of a welcoming police station may foster more pleasant emotional reactions and behaviourally-relevant perceptions for persons with criminal records, however, it elicits less pleasant emotional reactions and behaviourally-relevant perceptions for persons without a criminal history. Theoretical and practical implications in the pursuit of police architecture that foster positive police-community relationships are discussed.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Dr. James E. Wright, Florida State University and Dr. Kevin Wolff, John Jay College of Criminal Justice who helped inform the analytical decisions. Thank you.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The lengthy history of misuse of police power against Black and Brown people in the U.S. shape a geographically unique set of public perceptions and feelings about law enforcement in the country.
2 Emotions in Headley et al. (Citation2021), encompass feelings that a person has when faced with specific police station designs (e.g., would you feel nervous approaching this building?). Behaviourally relevant perceptions capture beliefs and attitudes that imply whether some direct action be taken or not (e.g., would you enter such a building?) with regard to reporting the property crime.
3 The 8th amendment delineates that correctional institutions cannot subject persons to cruel and unusual punishment; the 4th amendment protects the public from unreasonable searches and seizures from law enforcement and other government officials; and the 6th and 14th amendments combine to ensure that all persons are not deprived of life, liberty, or property by the court without due process.
4 The Headley et al. (Citation2021) scale was piloted on a MTurk sample where several buildings were selected for participants to rate across a series of OTI dimensions. The buildings varied in features (e.g., small windows vs. large windows, linear vs. curved designs, buildings that were several stories high or only one level, and buildings with exposed brick layering). Using exploratory factor analyses, the authors classified buildings as welcoming or hostile.
5 Legitimacy here is defined simply as ‘the state of being accepted as authoritative’ (Blount-Hill Citation2020, p. 115; Blount-Hill and Gau Citation2022).
6 For more information on the NORC AmeriSpeak® Panel Sampling Frame see AmeriSpeak (Citation2022).
7 Property crimes are more common occurrences in the U.S. and slightly less reported when compared to violent crime (Gramlich Citation2020) – thus, focusing on property crime enhances realism for the survey participant.
8 To ensure that the random assignment produced similar subgroups across conditions, chi-square tests of independence for the entire sample on key sociodemographic, political and experiential characteristics were used. Results support a rejection of the null hypothesis of independence in all analyses except for political party identification.
9 In the full sample, 730 respondents (out of 732 total) responded to this question, with 384 reporting very or somewhat satisfied, 122 reporting neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 142 reporting very or somewhat dissatisfied and 82 reporting not applicable because they had not been stopped by the police before.
10 Stepwise regression models (Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald Citation2013) were also conducted to first understand the main effects of prior intrusive police experience on the outcomes of interest and then to understand the interaction between prior experience and building design before conducting the subgroup analyses with the interaction. However, for the purpose of this paper, only the results from the full models are displayed.
11 For example, contexts outside the U.S. where racial tensions are not as prevalent and visible, may not have a similar set of relationships that exist across racial groupings and building design. Depending on the region, it may be more likely to have tensions that exist across other social groupings like ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, or class.