https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5673-9056
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ABSTRACT
The police occupy a central role in the functioning of the state by being tasked with upholding security, law and order. Across the African continent, the public has little trust in the police, but such perceptions are subject to considerable subnational variation. In this study, we are interested in how the different contexts in which the police operate affect police-citizen relations. We ask: How does an urban versus rural environment shape citizens’ trust in the police? We address this question within the context of Kenya, using geocoded survey data from Afrobarometer. We theorise that the rural versus urban environment will shape citizens’ experience with the police in ways that affect their attitudes toward the police. Specifically, we argue that in a context where the police have frequently been employed to repress specific sociopolitical groups, urban residents, living in denser and more diverse environments compared to rural residents, are more prone to have first- or second-hand experiences of the police that result in diminished trust towards them. Our results support these propositions: We find a strong and robust relationship between urban residence and lower levels of trust in the police. The relationship holds when controlling for respondents’ political alignment, which likely conditions people’s perceptions of state institutions. Qualitative evidence from interviews provide additional understanding of the urban-rural divide we identify. Our results provide important insights into the contextual dynamics that shape individuals’ trust in the police, and underline the importance of efforts to improve police-community relations in urbanising contexts.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the generous sharing of data by the Afrobarometer. We are grateful for feedback on previous versions of the manuscript by Anders Sjögren, Kristine Eck, Desirée Nilsson, and participants in the Research Paper Seminar (Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, April 2022), Urban Violence and Contestation workshop (May 2022), and Peace Research in Sweden conference (Stockholm, November 2022). Elfversson, Ha and Höglund have contributed equally to the writing and conceptualisation of the study, and its execution, except for the quantitative and qualitative empirical analyses. Elfversson and Ha have compiled the dataset and conducted all of the statistical analyses. Elfversson and Höglund have collected qualitative data in Kenya.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Supplemental material for this article is available online, including an appendix and replication data file.
Notes
1 The authors have longstanding research engagement with Kenya and have as part of a larger project on community-based conflict management conducted interviews with local residents, community leaders, police officers and government officials relating to police-citizen relations. The project was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (dnr 2019-03777) and research permit was granted by the Kenyan National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI) (license no. NACOSTI/P/22/16840).
2 Historically, Kenya has had a very high level of rural-biased electoral malapportionment (Barkan et al. Citation2006, Boone and Wahman Citation2015), but the 2010 constitution has rectified some of the biases in urban-rural representation.
3 Policing is also more challenging and complex in societies transitioning from civil unrest (Topping Citation2008), and different forms and levels of violence during armed conflict affect local-level prevalence of crime long after the conflict has ended (Deglow Citation2016).
4 Empirical evidence supports this assumption: a recent survey analysis found that across Africa, young, urban, male respondents were the most likely to have had interactions with the police in the past year (Logan et al. Citation2022).
5 In urban areas, the Reserve was disbanded in 2004, on the ground that many units based in the city had become corrupted and difficult to manage (Saferworld Citation2015).
6 Studies illustrate how police in rural areas are often able to collaborate with local chiefs and community elders to respond to violent incidents and prevent escalatory spirals (Mbuba and Mugambi Citation2011, Elfversson Citation2016), Research also shows that legitimacy and capacity of these institutions vary significantly, and they are often vulnerable to political manipulation and corruption (Van Tongeren Citation2013, Baldwin Citation2016, Kioko Citation2017). The ability of the police to cooperate with local institutions often reflects that they have for a long period been co-opted by colonial and postcolonial governments (Mamdani Citation1996, Boone Citation2014). Still, there is important evidence that such institutions often do retain a strong role in local governance and conflict management in rural areas (Akinwale Citation2010, Elfversson Citation2016).
7 The Afrobarometer sample of respondents is nationally representative. Round 5 was conducted in Kenya 2011 and covered circa 2400 respondents, round 6 (n = 2400) in 2014, round 7 (n = 1600) in 2016, and round 8 (n = 2400) in 2019.
8 Extending the analysis back in time, mistrust in the police is highest in the 2008 survey round with 45% of respondents reporting no trust at all in the police. This high level of mistrust in police is unsurprising given the breakdown of law and order in the 2007/2008 election.
9 More information about how these variables are coded for each round is available in Appendix 1.
10 Version of data as of 2021-08-09. ACLED data is publicly available on www.acleddata.com.
11 Interview, Naivasha, 3 November 2022.
12 Interview, Nakuru, 1 November 2022.
13 Interviews, Naivasha, 4 and 5 November 2022.
14 Interviews, Nakuru and Naivasha, November 2022.
15 Interview, NGO official, Nakuru, 31 October 2022; Interview, public official, Nakuru, 1 November 2022; Fieldnotes, 3 November 2022.
16 Interview, public official, Nakuru, 1 November 2022.
17 The full dataset is not yet released, and is therefore not included in our analysis.