A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, for example, characterized the few empirical studies in this domain as insufficient, concluding that “research is needed that tests the ability of a single interaction to shape general views about police legitimacy” (29). Point estimates and standard errors are presented in tabular form in SI Appendix, Table S14. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. Following best practice in the design and implementation of field experiments with survey outcomes (26, 33), we first contacted registered voters (n = 49,757) via mail to participate in an ostensibly unrelated survey that was presented as the first wave of a longitudinal university-sponsored public opinion study of city residents. All outcomes are transformed to a scale ranging from 0 to 100 in order to facilitate interpretation and comparisons across measures. acknowledges funding from the Field Experiments Initiative at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police–public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. The intervention had a significant positive effect on overall attitudes toward the police as measured by an index of all primary outcome measures 3 d after the intervention (ITT: t=6.94;P<0.001; ATT: t=7.15;P<0.001) and 21 d after the intervention (ITT: t=3.83;P<0.001; ATT: t=3.85;P<0.001). Regardless of the source, community policing is critical to identifying those who are planning to carry out acts of violence, preparing communities to respond, aiding public safety officials in the response, and when acts cannot be prevented, helping communities heal and recover. The time to build and strengthen relationships is before a crisis – during an event it is too late. A study suggests that tropical cyclones have been increasing in intensity over the past four decades, consistent with predictions of physical theory and numerical simulations. The youth shared information about the Somali community, the Muslim religion, and the challenges faced by youth in Boston. We also examined the effect on support for 2 specific policy initiatives: the department’s use of body-worn cameras and a 10% funding increase to hire more patrol officers. A lock ( Prior to the intervention, individuals in treatment and control scored similarly on all primary outcome indices (SI Appendix, Fig. Interpersonal contact between the public and government officials is a fundamental part of democratic political socialization, with negative experiences undermining trust and political efficacy (16), particularly in the domain of criminal justice (17⇓⇓–20). This foundational component of intergroup relations theory, proposed more than 50 y ago (23), has been subjected to only a handful of tests using randomized experiments conducted in the field rather than the laboratory (25). Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. The intervention described here, conversely, involved uniformed patrol officers in New Haven, CT, making unannounced visits to randomly assigned homes across the city’s 10 police districts. Planning efforts must identify community resources and engage them in exercises and drills, so that during a crisis, they are readily available and have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities in response to an act of terrorism or other critical incident. All participants were debriefed after the third survey wave. The findings reported here have both theoretical and applied importance. Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved August 12, 2019 (received for review June 12, 2019). endobj The immediate effect was strongest on perceptions of police performance and legitimacy, and these effects were also evident in the 21-d follow-up. Consent to participate in the 3 wave panel survey was obtained online during the first survey, and the HSC waived written informed consent for the home visit portion of the study per federal regulation 45 CFR 46.117 (c)(2). Armed with this information, law enforcement leaders must engage community members to develop and implement policies and strategies to prevent crime, terrorism, and targeted violence. Of those contacted by mail, 2,013 individuals nested in 1,852 households completed the baseline survey and provided their contact details to participate in follow-up surveys. An initial PAP, dated 15 September 2018, was uploaded to the Open Science Framework website on 16 September 2018. Similarly, the visits increased generalized positivity toward police by 9.5 points on 0 to 100 point “feeling thermometer” scale. Threats of terrorism come from a variety of sources – organized groups outside the country, those inside the country, and the lone attacker. We note there are long-standing concerns about the validity of these “trust in government” measures (38), and as described in our preanalysis plans, they were not included in the 21-day survey to make room for other questions. “In the African-American community, we’ve known about the problems of police brutality for decades,” Mr. Jeffries said. After the intervention, all 2,013 individuals who participated in the baseline survey were invited via email to complete 2 follow-up surveys. All secondary outcomes are scaled to range from 0 to 100. I’ve devoted much of my life to wrestling with the issues associated with terrorism and targeted violence: How do we prepare, how do we prevent attacks, how do we respond, and how do we recover from these tragedies? They maintain order, catch lawbreakers, and work to prevent crimes. Performance is an index of responses to 4 statements about police effectiveness (e.g., “I have confidence that the police in New Haven can do their job well”). Online ISSN 1091-6490. A whole community approach is necessary to prepare for acts of terrorism and targeted violence. Repeated instances of police violence against unarmed civilians have drawn worldwide attention to the contemporary crisis of police legitimacy. During the interaction, officers communicated respect by initiating a formal greeting, emphasizing that the visit was an equal status engagement with the goal of improving their shared community, and encouraging residents to provide feedback about policing and neighborhood issues. ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation, Popular legitimacy and the exercise of legal authority: Motivating compliance, cooperation, and engagement, We never call the cops and here is why: A qualitative examination of legal cynicism in three Philadelphia neighborhoods, Police violence and citizen crime reporting in the black community, The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing, The ecological structuring of police officers’ perceptions of citizen cooperation. The effect of the intervention was evident across all 4 primary outcome measures (Fig. The intervention reported here provides evidence in support of the power of positive intergroup contact, extending these insights to interactions between uniformed patrol officers and the individuals they police. Author contributions: K.P., M.S.-A., and D.G.R. Conceptually, the first 2 measures capture values-based beliefs about the normative appropriateness of the police, whereas the latter 2 measures capture behavioral legitimacy, or the willingness to act in a manner that aids law enforcement (35). This study was approved by the Human Subjects Committee (HSC) at Yale University (IRB Protocol ID 2000023097). Finally, the intervention also improved attitudes toward police on our secondary outcome measures (Fig. Our intervention, which focused on the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public, represents a significant departure from prior studies on police–community interactions. However, positive interpersonal contact does not necessarily lead to attitude change in contexts where intergroup relations are charged by a history of violent conflict (27), and field interventions demonstrating the efficacy of brief instances of positive contact for durable attitude change are still rare (25, 28). This is further supported by decades of research on the social psychology of intergroup relations more broadly: positive interpersonal contact can have a powerful effect on attitudes (23⇓–25), even in the case of a single brief interaction (26). Secondary outcomes included an index of respondents’ judgements about “the police” as a group (e.g., whether police officers are “compassionate” or “cold hearted”), an index of questions about respondents’ confidence in the police (e.g., “The police make me feel safer in my neighborhood”), and support for specific policies (e.g., a funding increase to hire more patrol officers). In this study, 1 small geographic area was, for a period of ∼10 mo, targeted with a variety of initiatives, including positive interpersonal contact, more frequent patrols and traffic stops, and newsletters delivered to residents by mail. <>>> We did not have sufficient research funds to conduct more than 2 follow-up surveys. Law enforcement agencies need to identify challenges, issues, and concerns that emerge at the neighborhood level by gathering real-time data. endobj Police officers come into frequent contact with the public and exercise wide discretion in the implementation of criminal justice policies (21). %PDF-1.5 The ITT represents the overall effect of the intervention (comparing all individuals assigned to treatment with all individuals assigned to control regardless of whether they were successfully contacted) and is relevant to the practical implementation of policing strategy, since no intervention that assigns unannounced police contact in a field setting can guarantee that all attempted visits will result in contact. Prepost interview data from residents in this targeted area were then compared with responses from a sample of residents in another area. By the end of the program, both groups expressed praise for its structure, the dialogue that it created, the trust that was built, and the cultural understanding that was shared among the participants and their families. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas. Following nationwide political unrest after Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, MO in 2014, President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing identified building trust and legitimacy as a foundational goal of effective and just policing (1). At an applied level, prior research on the effectiveness of neighborhood-level community policing has been hampered by the amorphous operationalization of this concept. Effect of community policing treatment on the index of primary outcomes by race/ethnicity. We measured the effects of these visits by combining the randomized experiment with parallel survey measurement. Background characteristics remained balanced across treatment and control for all subsequent survey waves (SI Appendix, Tables S7–S10), and differential attrition was not detected in any wave (SI Appendix, Tables S11 and S12). Community-oriented policing (COP), which encourages positive, nonenforcement contact between police officers and the public, has been widely promoted as a policy intervention for building public trust and enhancing police legitimacy. From April 2018 through June 2019, more than 80 youth and 45 police officers participated in the program, which brought youth and law enforcement together to learn more about one another. Furthermore, the visits had the strongest effect among individuals who held the most negative views toward police prior to the intervention as measured in the baseline survey (SI Appendix, section 5.2). Relatedly, the visits had a large positive effect on an index of questions about respondents’ confidence in the police (e.g., “The police make me feel safer in my neighborhood”). Covariate-adjusted point estimates and 95% confidence intervals are estimated separately for each of the 4 major subgroups of subjects in the study. Of particular note is the substantial reduction in generalized negative attitudes toward police as captured by a reduction in negative beliefs about police officers as a group and an increase in perceived warmth toward police on the feeling thermometer. S1 shows an overview. The lack of experimental designs in past evaluations further compounds difficulties in assessing the causal effect of COP on public attitudes toward police. Covariate-adjusted point estimates and 92% confidence intervals are constructed using the prespecified levels and estimation procedures described in the PAP (SI Appendix, Appendix C). This discretion covers not only what kinds of offenses they choose to formally sanction through citation or arrest (22) but also, how they choose to interact with the public. LockA locked padlock This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1910157116/-/DCSupplemental. Communities rely on police and prosecutors to protect them from crime and injustice. To date, however, there is little evidence that COP actually leads to changes in attitudes toward the police. Frank Straub, Director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies, National Police Foundation, "The Importance of Community Policing in Preventing Terrorism," March 3, 2020, nij.ojp.gov: Research for the Real World: NIJ Seminar Series, Frank Straub, Director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies, National Police Foundation. The value of community planning and preparedness has been demonstrated in many of the critical incident reviews conducted by CMVRS. Effect of community policing treatment on secondary outcome measures. Instead, it presents lessons learned by on-the-ground criminal justice leaders, from years of experience and thinking deeply about criminal justice issues. Of course, it is premature to definitively conclude that such an intervention could be successfully replicated in another jurisdiction, much less the full range of nearly 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies spread across the United States (42). Confidence in police is an index of responses from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” to 6 statements (e.g., “The police make me feel safer in my neighborhood”). Although these effects were comparatively smaller, the effect on willingness to cooperate is particularly noteworthy given how responses were clustered near the upper bound of this index at baseline (SI Appendix, Fig. Body-worn cameras were implemented in 2017, and this initiative was supported by 95% of respondents in the baseline survey. SI Appendix, section 1 provides additional information about recruitment, design, and sample characteristics. S10). 2 0 obj Toward community-oriented policing: Potential, basic requirements, and threshold questions, An Evidence-Assessment of the Recommendations of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Police-resident interactions and satisfaction with police: An empirical test of community policing assertions, Community-oriented policing to reduce crime, disorder and fear and increase satisfaction and legitimacy among citizens: A systematic review, “Police don’t like black people”: African-American young men’s accumulated police experience, Lessons of welfare: Policy design, political learning, and political action, Political consequences of the carceral state, Misdemeanor disenfranchisement? But in too many neighborhoods across the country, this vital relationship is strained. In light of the contemporary crisis of police legitimacy and recognition of the damage caused by aggressive policing and mass incarceration (8), community-oriented policing (COP) has reemerged as a potential policy tool for improving police–community relations. Following prior work, the “legitimacy” dimension included measures that tap the interdependent concepts of trust in the police and judgements about the normative alignment of police–public values (3, 6, 34⇓–36). SI Appendix, Fig. �K�pm����k��w���ofHΐ���w� �D��� g~3�&�o������w���2y��Ur�ç2���_-�����piU�|�@cR�y�$�V�JT��ׯn����2y�_]+Q� \k]&x�jd�ׯ���I�|=no��#���x\���7�����׋��a}�a����m��|��~����Zd�&��}� He holds a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, an M.A. For example, a recent study using a field experiment design similar to the one reported here showed that a single interaction with an activist canvasser could substantially reduce antitransgender prejudice, especially when the activist also identified as transgender (26). Writing and editorial support was provided by Blair Ames, a writer with a federal contractor on assignment at the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. We thank J. Dovidio, G. Grossman, J. Hacker, G. Huber, H. Jefferson, R. Johnston, J. Kalla, A. Papachristos, L. Peer, F. Sävje, and T. Tyler for helpful comments and feedback. The demobilizing effects of brief jail spells on potential voters, Staying out of sight? Procedural justice and police legitimacy: A systematic review of the research evidence, Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1910157116/-/DCSupplemental, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND), Opinion: Envisioning a biodiversity science for sustaining human well-being, Inner Workings: Racing to develop in-home COVID-19 tests, a potential game changer. As a collective group, law enforcement needs to recognize the importance of community relationships if we are going to identify individuals who pose a threat to our national security. We find evidence that the intervention caused a small reduction in support for body-worn cameras in the 3-d follow-up survey, but these effects were not statistically distinguishable from 0 in the 21-d follow-up, suggesting that the officer visits did not have a durable effect on residents’ support for this popular initiative. Copyright © 2020 National Academy of Sciences. The goals of YPIP were to build trust between youth and police officers while fostering community resilience to radicalization among Somali youth in the Boston area. Frank previously served as Chief of the Spokane, Washington, Police Department, where he received national recognition for the major reforms and community policing programs he implemented during his tenure. <>/Font<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. When police lack legitimacy, residents are less likely to contact police or cooperate with their investigations (4, 5). We found that positive contact with police—delivered via brief door-to-door nonenforcement community policing visits—substantially improved residents’ attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? To provide some context for this effect size, we note that this increase is larger than the gap between white and black respondents observed at baseline (5 points). Frank Straub is a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, currently serving as Director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies at the National Police Foundation. The intervention was also broadly effective across all preregistered subgroups (Fig. We then randomly assigned 926 households (1,007 individuals) to the treatment (i.e., to receive a COP visit) and 926 households (1,006 individuals) to the control (i.e., to receive no COP visit). Thus, efficacy was not limited to those subgroups inclined to have positive attitudes toward police prior to the intervention. Point estimates and standard errors are presented in tabular form in SI Appendix, Table S15. Police feeling thermometer is a sliding scale from “cold” (0) to “warm” (100). SI Appendix, section 2 shows all individual questions. No one is in trouble and everyone is safe.”). We use the term ATT rather than “complier average causal effect” since none of the units assigned to control were treated (see SI Appendix, section 4 for additional details). The broad effects of positive, nonenforcement police–public interactions reported here are especially noteworthy in light of the well-documented tensions between police and the public, including within minority communities, where one might expect longstanding distrust of police to engender decidedly negative interactions (39). Our Solution. These challenges and cautions notwithstanding, evaluation of similar interventions in other municipalities as well as long-term longitudinal analyses of downstream effects on outcomes like crime rates, crime reporting, and neighborhood violence, are clear avenues for future research. Concentrated policing and local political action, Legal socialization of children and adolescents, Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, Police discretion not to invoke the criminal process: Low-visibility decisions in the administration of justice, A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory, Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Published by PNAS. Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Effect of community policing treatment on primary outcome measures. Notes From the Field is not a research-based publication. The intervention also increased self-reported willingness to cooperate with police and willingness to comply with police directives. Additional details are provided in SI Appendix, section 4. These differences are substantively large: among those who were treated, attitudes toward the police increased by about 7 points on a 0 to 100 scale in the first follow-up survey. An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice. NIJ aims to address the critical questions of the criminal justice field, particularly at the state and local levels. A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy. For additional context, this is comparable with the 10-point increase in positivity toward transgender people reported in a recent field experiment that showed that brief door-to-door interactions emphasizing active perspective taking reduced transgender prejudice (26). The only field experiments related to COP we are aware of have used cluster-randomized designs that administered treatments across census block groups in the United States (31) and villages in post-conflict Liberia (32), preventing assessment of the individual-level effects of police-public contact on attitudes toward police. Community policing is more than any one program or partnership. 3). Even in police departments with an organizational commitment to COP, the reality of shrinking budgets and longstanding issues in the hiring and retention of officers will likely pose significant barriers to the implementation of such programs. As with other studies using such designs, differences in outcomes between control areas and those using a variety of COP interventions might be explained by differences across the communities in which COP was implemented rather than COP itself (14). Differentiating between trust and legitimacy in public attitudes towards legal authority, Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation, Procedural justice and order maintenance policing. The negative beliefs about police measure is an index of responses to 5 judgements about the police as a group measured using a sliding scale (e.g., the police as are rated from compassionate to cold hearted). endobj Legitimacy and cooperation: Why do people help the police fight crime in their communities? This project would not have been possible without the support and enthusiasm of many individuals at the New Haven Police Department past and present. A community-based counterterrorism program should be based on human relations — seeing people as people, not identifying them as police officers or by their religious or cultural beliefs. The replication data and statistical code for this study have been deposited at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) Data Archive (https://isps.yale.edu/research/data). Prior work has drawn largely on aggregate administrative records, cross-sectional surveys, case studies, and metaanalyses of various observational research designs (12⇓–14, 20). Officers were trained to anticipate suspicion and immediately disarm anxiety within the first 20 s of contact. <> in Forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a B.A. Working with community members allows police and prosecutors to effectively reduce crime, protect communities, and ensure justice. Legitimacy—the belief that an individual, group, or institution has the authority to dictate an individual’s behavior and demand their cooperation—is vital to the effective function of police as a social institution (2, 3). NIJ has launched the “Notes from the Field” series to allow leading voices in the field to share their strategies for responding to the most pressing issues on America’s streets today. As specified in our preanalysis plan (PAP) (SI Appendix, Appendix C), we included both primary (confirmatory) and secondary (exploratory) outcomes in the online panel survey. We assess the effect of the intervention by estimating the “average treatment effect on the treated” (ATT) and the “intent-to-treat effect” (ITT). Worse, police–public interactions charged by distrust are more likely to escalate into contests for dominance and status that can lead to the injury or death of police and the public alike (6). They then asked to speak with the resident(s) living at the home and engaged them in a brief 10-min conversation using a series of strategies shown in prior studies to encourage positive intergroup contact (23⇓–25). The intervention described here provides an example of how a relatively simple change to police behavior can have a substantial positive effect on measures of both values-based and behavioral legitimacy (35). Point estimates and standard errors are presented in tabular form in SI Appendix, Table S13. Prejudice reduction: What works? The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the research, development, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. Our study was reviewed by the Human Subjects Committee (HSC) at Yale University, and the HSC determined that it presented “minimal risk to research subjects” (Institutional Review Board Protocol ID 2000023097). About Notes From the Field . NIJ Director David Muhlhausen developed the Notes From the Field series to allow leading voices in the field to share their strategies for responding to the most pressing issues on America’s streets today. stream We do not capture any email address. Here, we report a field experiment that provides such a test. However, community policing provides a model that is built on collaboration, respect, and trust. These are available at https://osf.io/zhuqm/. Compliance is an index of responses to 4 questions about willingness to comply with police directives (e.g., “If the police tell you to do something, you should do it”). Of the 1,007 individuals in the treatment group, 412 were successfully reached at the door and received treatment. While the intervention assessed here improved public attitudes toward police, positive, nonenforcement police contact is no panacea for longstanding issues in policing that include police brutality, corruption, and racial bias (1). A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

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