Confidence in the police by race: taking stock and charting new directions

Abstract

The current study reflects a narrative mega-review of confidence in the police by race. This review has led to two conclusions. First, blacks and whites have different levels of confidence in the police, but the difference between races is a matter of degrees. Second, race is not the strongest predictor of confidence in the police in most multivariate analyses. When variables, such as police contacts and concentrated disadvantage, are controlled for, the effect of race tends to be attenuated and/or sometimes disappear. These results prompt us to urge scholars to chart new directions for future research: fairness and its flip side – injustice – rather than race should be the focus of empirical and analytical gaze. The practical implications derived from this review are twofold. First, central to improving minority confidence in the police is to treat people of all racial groups fairly and equitably. Second, the police and the policed must come to terms and have faith in our democratic system and reform. This review is the first of its kind. We conclude by proposing a template of explaining confidence in the police by race with fairness as the tying knot.

Keywords:

• Confidence in the police
• fairness
• legitimacy
• race/ethnicity

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Ivan Sun for his comments on the earlier draft.

Notes

1. Mindful of the complexity of race, we use the term as a placeholder for both race and ethnicity, while understanding the ongoing scholarly and political debates that challenge the definitions and usefulness of both terms (see Martin, 2006). The definitions of race and ethnicity are not mutually exclusive. Racial and ethnic variations exist within and across groups. For example, people who identify their ethnic origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.

2. Legitimacy is a highly contested concept. While most scholars examine the issue of legitimacy from citizens’ position, other scholars have added another dimension of the concept: from the powerholders’ view (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012, p. 120). In addition, legitimacy construct cannot totally disentangle from the measure of procedural justice (see Gau, 2015).

3. For more discussion regarding the nuanced differences that exit between confidence in the police, trust in the police and satisfaction in the police, see Cao (2015).

4. Garcia and Cao (2005) alerted us about the phenomenon of ‘big-city focus’ in our thinking about police organizations in the US. In reality, more than 75 percent of local police organizations in America employ fewer than 25 sworn officers (Langworthy & Travis, 1994). More studies on public confidence in the police in small towns are needed.

5. This result may reflect African Americans’ dissatisfaction with some program components of community policing in the study jurisdiction. Community policing started as a means to improve the relationship between the public and the police (Garcia & Cao, 2005; Ren et al., 2005). As practiced, many programs under the influence of broken window thesis, however, began to do proactive policing, which, unintentionally, further alienated the relationship between the public and the police. It is possible that Schafer et al.’s study (2003) may have captured this effect of community policing.

6. The Rodney King Incident happened on March 3, 1991 and the video tape by George Holiday was showing everywhere a week later. The interview survey was conducted in April 1991 when most people were aware of the incident, but apparently had confidence in the criminal justice system in dealing with it because four officers were charged with the use of excessive force on March 14, 1991. The public opinions on the criminal justice system, including the police, plunged only after the acquittal trial of all four officers involved a year later on April 29, 1992.

7. Even the community representation strategy can be limited as a policy implication for the group position theory, as size of a group’s population does not always correspond with size of power that group has in the society.

8. Maguire and Johnson (2010) argued that fairness is also the most important dividing line within blacks and within whites.

9. Any residue (direct) effect of race on confidence after taking the mediating mechanism of perception of fairness into account is likely beyond the police efforts as the police’s ability ‘to improve life is restricted to doing little harm’ (Manning, 2010, p. 248).