Halo effects and public evaluation of police service

ABSTRACT

Public opinion of police service provides important guidelines for government leaders and policy practitioners who strive to improve police-community relations and restructure law enforcement agencies. Despite its widespread use, citizen evaluation of police service is bias-prone due to the subjective nature of people’s judgment heuristics. Considering that the impact of police actions on public opinion is not limited to those that police directly deal with, this study examines whether people’s general impression on the police plays a role in how they rate smaller traits of police. To this end, the present study revisits Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues’ Police Services Study conducted in Rochester, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Findings show that citizens’ overall perception on police service creates a halo, which positively influences their subsequent appraisals of police courtesy, equal treatment, and honesty, respectively. This study ultimately underscores the nuanced understanding of police service information reported from citizen surveys.

KEYWORDS:

• Halo effects
• Police service
• Public opinion
• Public service

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Andy Whitford, Bradley Wright and Sun Young Kim for their valuable comments on earlier draft, and to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ People tend to shape their own opinion on the police not only by their direct contacts with officers but also by the perception of police interactions with their neighbors or from the media coverage of law enforcement activities.

² Although we use SLM, we also provide the result of ordered logistic regression model with a standardized coefficient and odd ratio for each predictor (see supplemental materials).

³ To better explain the relationship among each variable of the analyses, both correlations (table S1) and factor analysis (table S2) are included as supplemental materials.

⁴ Funded by National Science Foundation in the 1970s, Elinor Ostrom’s Police Services Study went on for six years across 200 urban areas across the country.