Trust the Police? How Attitudes about the Police and Their Violence Are Made

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

When social disputes threaten to become unruly or violent, the police are usually the first governmental institution to intervene. This pattern places the police at the frontline of a country’s major social and political disputes. Consequently, how attitudes toward police are formed and what citizens demand of their police when they are called to intervene in social disputes – whether to police crime, crowds, or conflicts – are major political questions.

Drawing on a global selection of cases, the papers on this panel collectively ask how citizens develop trust in the police, what undermines that trust, and how citizens’ expectations for their police can clash with what police actually do. In doing so, the papers produce surprising results – from data that suggests citizens may want protests to be policed violently, that greater levels of police-community interaction may reduce trust in the police, and that those most knowledgeable about policing (police violence experts and police commanders themselves) often have diametrically opposed understandings of how the police should do their job. Collectively, these papers show how difficult it is to develop trust in the police and the contradictory demands police face when doing their work. Particularly in developing countries, the political stakes of these findings are high, as such countries often face political transitions, the rebuilding of state capacity in the wake of conflict, and frequent protests for greater economic equality.

Specifically, the papers draw from Colombia, South Africa, and China. Albarracin and Tiscornia examine Colombian citizens’ response to protests for economic redistribution in Cali. In contrast to literature drawn from the United States, which shows that citizens want low levels of violence during protest, Albarracin and Tiscornia find the opposite: that citizens frequently demand high levels of violence during such protests, especially among groups threatened by economic demands. Similarly examining Colombia, Berg also finds a poor fit of American-derived models of police trust. In post-conflict societies like Colombia, Berg shows, the complicated nature of still-evolving security threats means that citizens often bristle against restrictions on police use of force. Shifting to South Africa, Smith finds that even as citizens dispute how police should act, so too do policing experts. When confronting crowds, police commanders and police violence experts often have sharply divergent views of the proper course of action. These contrasting views suggest that citizens’ contradictory expectations of police officers are also replicated among experts. Finally, in China, Scoggins examines how police claims about themselves cultivate loyalty. Examining the use of Chinese police propaganda on social media, Scoggins finds that - rather surprisingly - humorous depictions of police cultivate loyalty in the Chinese populace most effectively.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Policing Protest in Unequal Democracies. Violence and Police Image in Colombia - Juan Albarracin Dierolf, University of Illinois, Chicago; Lucia Tiscornia, University College Dublin

• What Have You Done for Me Lately? Policing and Public Trust in Postwar Colombia - Louis-Alexandre Berg, Georgia State University

• Fuck Up?: How South African Police and Policing Experts Explain Police Killing - Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY-City College

• Constructing State Legitimacy: Public Opinion, Douyin, and Police Propaganda - Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University

Chair

• Jessica Zarkin Claremont McKenna College

Discussant

• Jessica Zarkin Claremont McKenna College