Perceived police performance, racial experiences, and trust in local government

ABSTRACT

Given the continued revelation of police abuses of racial-ethnic minorities in America, it is of the utmost importance for scholars to focus on questions of how police conduct is related to minority political behavior, in particular their trust in local government. In this paper, we find evidence that both egotropic and sociotropic insecurity and experiences with police have a significant correlation with confidence in local government. The effects of both victimization and negative interactions with police have a substantive association with the ways that communities of color perceive their local government. Combining data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and contextual data from the U.S. Census Bureau, FBI crime statistics, and “Mapping Police Violence” project, we use maximum likelihood to examine how police conduct, personal experiences with the police, and neighborhood conditions correlate with individuals' trust in local government.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 Violent crime is classified as murder/manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The measure is based on the number of violent crimes per 10,000 residents.

2 The MPV database is accessible at: mappingpoliceviolence.org We cross-checked the MPV with “The Counted” database compiled by The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database). The Guardian’s database counts the number of people killed by police officers and other law enforcement officers between 2015 and 2016. The count was executed through news reporting on police reports and witness statements as well as reviewing regional news outlets, research reports and crowdsourced databases. To verify the accuracy of the MPV data, we pulled a random draw of 10 percent of the incidents from the MPV between 2015 and 2016. Then, we culled the same data from “The Counted” database. Lastly, we compared the MPV and the Guardian data for 2015 and 2016 utilizing the “duplicates report” routine in STATA. Across both years with only two nonmatches.

3 Police behavior and trust in government are mutually constitutive. Scholars have been attempting to disentangle the endogeneity between police performance and trust in local government. Morris and Klesner (2010) highlight the embeddedness of policing in the concept of the local government, finding that "after creating instrumented values for (perceptions of police malfeasance and trust in government) in the first stage of the 3SLS regression procedure, each [variable] remains the most powerful predictor of the other in the second-stage equations. We must be clear that given the data, we are unable to definitively tease out the causation." However, the correlations do highlight that perceptions of police performance are significantly associated with levels of trust in local government. While we cannot make definitive claims about the causality of these phenomenon, it does point to new avenues of research that should make use of time series datasets, qualitative methods, or experiments to better clarify the direction of this relationship. Nevertheless, given the importance of our topic, we attempt to contribute an analysis of race, trust in local government, and perceptions of police performance to move this literature forward while the direction of causality is further investigated.