Police legitimacy or risk-avoidance: what makes people feel safe?

ABSTRACT

This paper’s focus is Russia, a country where trust in police has been low for decades. We examine key factors that explain citizens’ assessments of risk and safety, perceptions of police legitimacy and engagement in precautionary behaviors. We further explore the relationship between gender, prior victimization, and neighborhood incivilities to explain citizens’ safety perceptions. Two key findings emerge from a survey of millennials from St. Petersburg, Russia. Police legitimacy is a strong predictor that is positively related to citizens’ safety perceptions. However, engagement in precautionary behaviors is inversely related to respondents’ safety and risk perceptions. In addition, we have found that being a female is a strong predictor of feeling unsafe, a finding consistent with studies from other parts of the world. Neighborhood incivilities are negatively associated with safety perceptions, but its effect was only marginal for men in the subgroup analysis. Implications for the citizens’ practices of engagement in co-producing safety versus enhancing police legitimacy and the police role in enhancing risk and safety perceptions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety
• risk
• police legitimacy
• risk aversive behavior
• trust in police
• police effectiveness
• crime in Russia
• fear of crime
• perceptions of safety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahesh K. Nalla

Mahesh Nalla is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His research centers on crime governance with a focus on public and private policing. His research has appeared in the Journal of Research and Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, among others. He had coordinated and led a global project on firearm-related violence prevention programs for the United Nations. As a follow-up, he drafted the International Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, and Other Related Materials, as a supplement to the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Anna Gurinskaya

Anna Gurinskaya holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia and, Professor, Faculty of Law, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her current research projects include social regulation and crime prevention; migration and criminal policy; private policing; procedural justice and police legitimacy; and, digital technologies and crime control.