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Ethics Toolkit

CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Methodology

CHAPTER 2. THE GENERAL IMAGE OF POLICE

I. Introduction

II. General versus Specific Measures

III. How to Measure General Police Image

IV. General Police Image Over Time

V. Factors Influencing the General Image of the Police

Personal Characteristics of the Citizen

Nature of the Citizen’s Recent Contact with Police

Mass Media Portrayals of Police and Crime

VI. Police Image Compared to Other Major Social Institutions

VII. Police Image from Community Surveys

VIII. Conclusion

CHAPTER 3. PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF THE OUTCOMES OF POLICING

I. Introduction

II. Different Ways to Measure Police Outcomes

III. Police-crime Outcome-oriented Elements: Results from National Polling Data

IV. Community Outcome-oriented Elements and the Public’s

General Image of the Police

V. Responsibility for Crime Control: Neighborhood- and Citizen-level Differences

VI. Conclusions

CHAPTER 4. PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF POLICING PROCESSES

I. Introduction

II. Generic Dimensions of the Quality of Service

Attentiveness

Reliability

Responsiveness

Competence

Manners

Fairness

Integrity

III. Police-specific Dimensions of the Quality of Service

Stops and Searches

Use of Force

IV. Race and the Image of Police

V. The Relationship between Police Processes and the General

Image of the Police

VI. High Visibility Events and the Police Image Regarding Processes

VII. The Consequences of the Police Image

VIII. Conclusions

CHAPTER 5. IMPROVING PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF THE POLICE IMAGE:THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY POLICING

I. The Impact of Community Policing on General, Outcome, and Process Measures

II. Conclusions

CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

I. Review of Findings and Implications

General Police Image

Perceptions of the Outcomes of Policing

Public Perceptions of Policing Processes

Improving the Public Perception of the Police

A Perspective on the Findings

II. Recommendations for Future Research

Research Questions

Agenda for Future Data Collection

REFERENCES

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Study’s Purpose

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of published research on the public image of the police. The report covers three types of police images: general perceptions of the police as an organization or institution, perceptions of police outcomes, and perceptions of police processes. The report considers research that reflects on improving the image of police. It summarizes the findings and discusses the implications for future research.

Methodology

Two types of reviews were conducted: a review of published research and a review of archived data sets pertaining to the image of the police held by the public. A comprehensive search of social science research literature was conducted to obtain a base for the literature review. We attempted to obtain all of the publications drawing on national surveys of police. We were selective in drawing upon surveys relevant to specific police agencies, using these where national surveys did not provide insights to important questions.

A thorough search of publicly available archives of national and major international surveys of the police image was also conducted. Surveys of samples drawn on a state, county, or municipality were not considered unless they offered some valuable insights to broader questions about the police image. Where available we obtained copies of the survey instruments (or those parts relevant to the police image) and basic characteristics of the sample. From this information we prepared a catalog that will allow IACP to view the entire scope of existing survey data on the police image that are already available. This catalog is provided separately in a form that is electronically accessible. Selected data from these surveys are presented in Exhibits in this report.

Major Findings and Recommendations

• The public image of the police is complex. It has many aspects, grouped under three general categories: overall image, perceptions of police outcomes, and perceptions of police processes. There are different ways to measure each aspect. Findings can vary considerably according to which aspect is measured and how each is measured.
• Polls of the adult population in the United States since the 1960s show that the majority of the public has an over-all positive view of the police. Depending on the year and the particular measure used, the percentage of respondents with a positive assessment of police has been between 51 and 81 percent. When asked to assess service to their own neighborhoods, respondents tend to produce even higher evaluations. Relatively few citizens offer a negative assessment of police.
• The police consistently rank among the institutions and occupations in which the public expresses the highest confidence and trust.
• Most citizens are satisfied with police service in their own neighborhood, and this level of satisfaction appears to vary little from one urban jurisdiction to another. Cross-jurisdiction research on this topic is limited to a small number of jurisdictions, however.
• Citizens’ experiences with the police affect their over all assessment of the police. The more positive a citizen’s recent experience with the police, the more positive the citizen’s over-all assessment of the police. However, previously held views of police do not change easily and themselves tend to influence how citizens interpret their own experiences with the police.
• The vast majority of the American public has not had a face-to-face contact with a police officer in the previous twelve months, so it will be difficult for police to make large improvements in their over all public image by the direct contact they have with the public.
• Large portions of the American public report using the mass media as their primary source of information about crime, and these stories are the context for most mass media accounts of police work. News and entertainment media portray police and police work in a highly distorted fashion. The recent trend toward “tabloid-style” journalism – even in mainstream media – appears to reduce public confidence and trust in the police.
• Between the 1980s and mid-1990s, increasing numbers of the American public gave police protection in their area a positive assessment.
• Neighborhood residents hold both police and residents responsible for controlling crime in the neighborhood.
• At the end of the 20th century, substantial majorities of the American public expressed positive views of how police treat the public. Police ranked highest in being helpful and friendly and lowest in treating people fairly.
• The public image of honesty and ethical standards of police has improved substantially from 1997 to 2000.
• The majority of the American public does not perceive police brutality in their area, but from the mid-1960s to the end of the 20th century the percentage who do perceive brutality has increased approximately threefold, accounting for a third of the public. This increase may be due at least in part to the public’s changing standards of what constitutes brutality. The public has become less accepting of police use of force during this time period.
• Across nearly all indicators of the public image of the police, racial minorities consistently show lower assessments of police than do whites. These race effects appear to be particularly enduring for citizens’ assessments of police fairness and use of force.
• The over-all legitimacy of the police depends much more on citizens’ perceptions of how the police treat them than on their perceptions of police success in reducing crime. Public confidence in and support for the police depends more on citizens’ perceptions of police officers’ motives than whether the outcome was personally favorable to the citizen.
• The public’s perceptions of how police treat them appear to affect their willingness to obey the law and obey the police.
• Negative publicity about the police in one city that receives high visibility around the nation may have a nation-wide impact on the public’s view of the police, but the effect appears to be modest and not enduring.
• When the public perceives major threats to the nation’s security, the overwhelming majority appear willing to give additional powers to the police that invade privacy and restrict liberty, but substantial portions of the public are also concerned about the possibility of police abuses of these powers.
• Community policing may have some modest, long-term positive influence on citizens’ satisfaction with police, but it is unlikely to produce a “quick fix.”

The following represents a distillation of the major findings of this study.

• Between the 1980s and mid-1990s, increasing numbers of the American public gave police protection in their area a positive assessment.
• Neighborhood residents hold both police and residents responsible for controlling crime in the neighborhood.
• At the end of the 20th century, substantial majorities of the American public expressed positive views of how police treat the public. Police ranked highest in being helpful and friendly and lowest in treating people fairly.
• The public image of honesty and ethical standards of police has fluctuated over the years but has improved substantially from 1977 to 2000.
• At the end of the 20th century, a majority of the American public perceives racial profiling to be a widespread practice and a problem.
• The majority of the American public does not perceive police brutality in their area, but from the mid-1960s to the end of the 20th century the percentage who do perceive brutality has increased approximately threefold, accounting now for a third of the public. This increase may be due at least in part to the public’s changing standards of what constitutes brutality. The public has become less accepting of police use of force during this time period.
• Across nearly all indicators of the public image of the police, racial minorities consistently show lower assessments of police than do whites. These race effects appear to be particularly enduring for citizens’ assessments of police fairness and use of force.
• The over-all legitimacy of the police depends much more on citizens’ perceptions of how the police treat them than on their perceptions of police success in reducing crime. Public confidence in and support for the police depends more on citizens’ perceptions of police officers’ motives than whether the outcome was personally favorable to the citizen.
• The public’s perceptions of how police treat them appear to affect their willingness to obey the law and obey the police.
• Negative publicity about the police in one city that receives high visibility around the nation may have a nation-wide impact on the public’s view of the police, but the effect appears to be modest and not enduring.
• When the public perceives major threats to the nation’s security, the overwhelming majority appear willing to give additional powers to the police that invade privacy and restrict liberty, but substantial portions of the public are also concerned about the possibility of police abuses of these powers.
• Community policing may have some modest, long-term positive influence on citizens’ satisfaction with police, but it is unlikely to produce a “quick fix.”

The following summarizes the major limitations of the available research and lists recommendations for future research.

• Different measures of the public’s image of the police can produce radically different results. Research is needed to identify the best survey items to accomplish specific research and evaluation purposes. Doing this will provide more valid and reliable measures for learning what the public image of the police is and what influences that image.
• Very little is known about the relative importance of various sources of information on the police’s public image. Research is needed to learn how much influence is exerted by the public’s personal experiences with the police, what they learn second-hand from friends and acquaintances, and what they learn from the mass media. Knowing how much and in what ways each of these sources influence public opinion about the police will help police develop more effective strategies for improving the public’s evaluations of and support for the police.
• Very little is known about the influence of nationally publicized events on the police image. Knowing how both negative and positive publicity in one community affects the public’s image of police in other communities will help police leaders learn how to deal more effectively with the consequences of those events in their local communities.
• Very little is known about how much variation there is in levels of citizen satisfaction with the police from community to community, and even less is known about what types of communities and police agencies show the highest and lowest levels of satisfaction. Research on this topic will help to validate what most effectively enhances the police image. Given the tremendous diversity of communities and police agencies, the research must distinguish what works in different kinds of communities. Virtually all of the survey research on the police image has concentrated on relatively large urban jurisdictions.
• Very little is known about contextual influences on patterns of public opinion about the police. Patterns may be different when crime is high compared to when crime is low, when there are strongly perceived threats to national security and when there are not.
• Very little is known about the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of police performance. When the crime rate is going up or down does the public credit the police with this effect? Because police tend to rely heavily on objective measures of performance in dealing with crime and solving problems, it is important to know whether success or failure objectively measured translates into public credit and accountability when measured subjectively through public opinion surveys.
• Little is known about the implications of public opinion for public behavior that is of concern to police. Are there thresholds of public satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a community that indicate a considerably increased likelihood of citizen support or resistance to the police? What are the consequences of shifts in the police image for the tenure of police leadership? Answers to these questions will help police leaders use poll results to predict short and long-term trends in citizens’ behaviors that are important to police.

The report concludes with a proposal for IACP to take a lead role in developing a data collection system that would enable its membership to track its progress in improving the police image and make it possible for researchers to answer the research questions listed above. The working name for this program is the Uniform Public Opinion Poll on Policing (UPOPP). The UPOPP system would be a voluntary program that would provide survey research planning to participating agencies. Those agencies would agree to conduct an annual public opinion survey in their jurisdictions. In addition to a common set of survey questions for all agencies, these surveys could also include questions crafted to suit the special needs of that department and the community it serves. Data would be archived by a research organization selected by IACP. In addition to providing advice on the design and implementation of the annual survey, the research organization would analyze the archived data, issuing an annual report on the state of the public image of police.

The following sections of the executive summary provide a more detailed description of findings and recommendations. Findings are divided into major sections on the general image of the police, perceptions of the outcomes of policing, perceptions of policing processes, and improving the public perception of the police. This is followed by a discussion that places the findings in perspective. The executive summary concludes with a discussion of priority issues for future research and an agenda for data collection.

The General Image of Police

The general image of the police offers an overview of the public’s perception of the police. Particular characteristics of the people, organization, or institution remain undifferentiated. Measures of the general image are useful because they provide a summary measure of the level of overall favorableness or support that the public holds for the police.

• How one measures image makes a difference.

  • The more general the question, the more positive the response tends to be.

  • Slight changes in the wording of the question or the response options can make a big difference in how positive the image appears to be.

  • Questions that measure the “favorableness” of the police image tend to generate more positive responses than questions that ask about “confidence” in the police.

• The majority of the public has a substantial degree of confidence in the police as a general institution.

  • Only a small percentage of polled citizens reports having very little or no confidence in the police in their community.

  • The proportion of people with confidence in the police can change several percentage points from year to year, but it often changes only 2-3 points per year.

  • Confidence in police has been declining slowly since 1996 (from 60 to 54 percent).

• The trend in respect for the police is that the level of positive views of the police have been declining since the mid-to-late 1960s.

• A more positive general image of the police is associated with the following characteristics of the public:

  • Being older. National samples of high school seniors consistently rate the job police (generally) are doing as substantially lower than do national samples of older persons.

  • Being of higher wealth or socio-economic status

  • Living in suburban (as opposed to urban) areas

  • Being white (as opposed to black)

  • Having positive attitudes about one’s own neighborhood

• One major study of Chicago suggests that there is no difference between blacks and whites when socio-economic disadvantage of the neighborhood is taken into account. That is, blacks’ negativity toward police appears to be due to their concentration in disadvantaged areas.

• Negative attitudes about the police by disadvantaged persons appears to be part of a more diffuse alienation from government, law, and the political process generally.

• Citizens’ experiences with the police influence their general image of the police.

  • One study indicates that police courtesy/friendliness toward the citizen in a recent contact with police exerts the most powerful influence on the citizen’s general evaluation of the police. This holds for situations where the citizen’s contact was involuntary (traffic stops) and voluntary (breaking-and-entering complaints).

  • However, two studies have indicated that people’s prior general views of police have stronger influence on their evaluation of a subsequent specific contact than their evaluation of a specific contact has on subsequent general views of police.

  • The vast majority of the American public has not had face-to-face contact with a police officer in the previous twelve months.

• Most citizens regard the mass media as their prime source of information about crime, and crime news is the context for most mass media accounts of police work.

  • The implicit message of much crime news is the inability to catch offenders.

  • There is an increasing trend in the news media to concentrate their coverage on a few sensational cases in a tabloid style of journalism. The net impact of tabloid-style coverage appears to be a decline in confidence in the police.

  • Entertainment media present images of police that distort the realities of every-day police work. Although more positively presented than attorneys and judges, police are more often than not presented as incompetent rule-breakers.

• Since 1993 the police consistently rate among the top three institutions out of thirteen in public confidence (with the military clearly at the top and churches/organized religion and the police vying for second place). Police rate much higher than the rest of the criminal justice system.

• Large majorities of adult citizens are satisfied or very satisfied with police service in their neighborhoods.

  • Although there is variation in satisfaction levels across urban jurisdictions, most fall within the 80-90 percent range.

  • The majority of school-age children in Cincinnati trust their local police, but a large portion do not, and this distrust is particularly strong among nonwhite students.

Public Perceptions of the Outcomes of Policing

Outcomes are identified by knowing the goals that people hold for the public – the consequences of doing police work. Police nowadays are expected to accomplish a variety of outcomes, including reducing crime and disorder, reducing fear of crime, solving neighborhood problems and improving quality of life, and developing greater community cohesion. However, most of the research on the public perception of the police image has focused on the impact of the police on crime and safety.

• From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, increasing numbers of the public have offered positive assessments of the quality of police protection.

• Confidence in the ability of the police to achieve traditional crime-focused goals appears to be high based on a 1995 survey. 74 percent expressed confidence in the police to protect citizens from crime, 74 percent to solve crime, and 65 percent to prevent crime.

  • African Americans reported lower ratings than whites and Hispanics.

• Residents appear to hold police at least partially responsible for outcomes at the neighborhood level.

• There is a relationship between satisfaction levels of police service in the neighborhood and residents’ ratings of crime, disorder, and physical decay in the neighborhood.

• Research at the community level suggests that residents believe that citizens share responsibility for controlling crime.

• This relationship holds across neighborhoods with different levels of family income, home ownership, and length of occupancy – differing only according to ethnicity.

• Hispanics appear more likely to hold police solely responsible for controlling crime.

Public Perceptions of Policing Processes

The processes of policing are how police do their work. The aspects of police processes that one might study are virtually infinite, but the public cares most about those that are captured by the notion of “service.” Service has many dimensions, some of which are generalizable to a wide variety of human services, not just policing: attentiveness, reliability, responsiveness, competence, manners, fairness, and integrity. Some features of service are peculiar to police – those aspects of their authority that empower them to intrude on citizens’ privacy and coerce them: stops and searches and use of force, for example.

The research on most aspects of the public’s view of policing processes is limited in scope. The following represent the major findings from the limited research available.

• Police attentiveness to crime victims (providing them counseling on how to undo the negative effects of victimization) has a positive effect on their attitude toward the police.

• Citizens’ expectations about how the police will perform affects their evaluation of how they perform in a specific situation.

  • Positive evaluations are associated with perceived performance that meets or exceeds prior expectations.

• A substantial majority of the public rates their police as doing an excellent or pretty good job of being “helpful and friendly.”

• A substantial majority of the public express positive attitudes about the fairness of the police, but a significant portion rate them as “only fair or poor.”

  • African Americans, younger people, singles, and low-income respondents tend to offer less positive evaluations of police fairness. The difference is particularly striking between African Americans and whites.

  • Racial disparities in assessments of police fairness may be caused in part by indirect exposure to unfair treatment by receiving second-hand accounts from others in their neighborhood.

  • Almost one in five respondents fear that the police will stop and arrest them when they are completely innocent.

• The public image of the honesty and ethical standards of police has fluctuated considerably, but has improved substantially from 1977 to 2000.

  • In 2000 the police ranked 10th out of 32 occupations rated on honesty and ethical standards.

• Approximately one in ten respondents in a national survey reported that they had been stopped by police because of their racial or ethnic background.

  • Blacks were seven times more likely to report this than whites.

• Most vehicle operators stopped by police felt that they had been stopped legitimately, but there were significant differences by race and gender.

  • Men and blacks were less likely to feel that their stops were legitimate

• Most vehicle operators who are searched by police feel that the search was not legitimate.

  • Blacks were substantially more likely to view the search as illegitimate than whites.

• A study in England found that citizens were more likely to feel fairly treated when officers gave a good reason for the stop.

• In 1999 59 percent of the American public perceived racial profiling by the police as “widespread,” and in 2000 75 percent viewed it as a problem in the United States.

  • Blacks are much more likely than whites to perceive that racial profiling by police is widespread.

• Nearly all citizens who experience police force view the police behavior as improper.

• Nearly all citizens view police force as appropriate when a citizen attacks the officer, and the majority approve when a suspect escapes from custody, but few citizens approve when a citizen says vulgar or obscene things to a police officer.

  • The public’s acceptance of police force is declining over time, especially for suspect escapes and the use of vulgar or obscene language.

  • Lowered thresholds of what constitutes brutality in the public’s mind may account for some of the significant increase in the public’s perception of brutality.

• The citizen’s race is a significant influence on the citizen’s assessment of the quality of the police process.

  • Hispanics, and especially African Americans, evaluate police less favorably on the use of force, fairness, friendliness, and promptness.

  • For citizens who have had contact with the police within the previous two years, when the level of satisfaction with that contact is taken into account, race is no longer an significant influence on citizens’ assessments of police friendliness and promptness. However, race remains a significant influence on assessments of use of force and fairness.

• A small, but growing number of studies indicates that citizens’ assessments of police processes have a powerful influence on their view of police legitimacy.

  • Trust in the motives of legal authorities, such as the police, has more impact on police legitimacy than the citizen’s view of the fairness or favorability of the outcome for that person. This is uniform across race/ethnic groups.

  • Citizens’ assessments of police competence and fairness are both significant predictors of the public’s general confidence in and support for the police, but the fairness assessment is by far the more powerful of the two predictors. This holds for both whites and racial minorities.

  • A study in Oakland during a time when police were using aggressive tactics to suppress gangs and gun-related crimes showed that public support for the police was influenced far more by how police interact with the public than whether crime was reduced.

• The Rodney King incident may have had a nationwide effect on the public’s view of police honesty and integrity in the few years following the event, but the effect was modest and not enduring. Other high visibility events (Louima, Diallo, and Ramparts) showed no readily discernable effect.

• In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, the overwhelming majority of the public was willing to give additional powers to police to conduct surveillance, identify, and apprehend terrorists.

  • However, substantial proportions of the public were concerned about the possibility of police abuses of these powers.

• A growing body of research suggests that how the public feels about the way police treat them affects the public’s behavior (obeying the law and obeying the police).

  • Most of this research is based on studies of citizen contacts with the police.

Improving Public Perceptions of the Police Image: The Impact of Community Policing

This report reviewed studies that evaluate the impact of community policing on the public’s perception of the police. Community policing’s philosophy emphasizes the importance of meeting the community’s needs, and there has recently been some research that allows an assessment of its impact. The aspect of community policing that has been evaluated is the attempt to increase citizen participation at the neighborhood level.

• Community policing may have some modest positive influence on citizens’ satisfaction with the police.
• Some evidence suggests that adoption of community policing programs is associated with perceptions of improved quality of neighborhood life and improvement in the image of the police.
• Community policing reforms are unlikely to provide a quick fix, but entail a long-term commitment by police to work with citizens to address neighborhood ills.

A Perspective on the Findings

The public image of the police is complex, making generalizations difficult. There is no single best measure of the police image. Researchers should carefully select the best measures to suit the specific purposes of their research, taking care to avoid cynical selection of only those measures that tend to show the police in the most positive light.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the image of American police can be characterized as positive or mixed, depending upon one’s interpretation. There is reason for both alarm and celebration. Many indicators show that American police are among the most trusted and admired institutions of contemporary society, while there are also many indicators that the American public – especially the young and disadvantaged – are wary of the police and see plenty of room for improvement. Although police appear to enjoy legitimacy with the majority of people in even the groups who are most disaffected, police leaders should not be complacent. Substantial portions of the disadvantaged are not so positive, and it is precisely these people whose cooperation and good will the police need in general and in the every-day work of the street officer. Even relatively low levels of public dissatisfaction with police are problematic if they are concentrated among groups who have a self-identity as “victims” of policing.

There appear to be at least three ways in which the public forms negative impressions of police: the direct experiences of the public with the police, how the police are presented to the public through the press and entertainment media, and the standards and expectations the public holds for the police. This is the most complex, because – even when performance measured objectively is rising – the public’s standards and expectations may be rising even more rapidly. When this happens, the public – or certain segments of the public – remain continually dissatisfied as they “raise the bar” of police performance higher than the police are going. The police themselves may play a role in raising public expectations and standards, which ultimately affects the public’s assessment of their performance.

Issues for Future Research

A number of important issues are highlighted for future research. Addressing these issues and answering these questions will help police be more effective in improving public perceptions of them, their practices, and their accomplishments.

• More research should be done to identify the best survey measures for specific purposes. Measurement issues include not only question wording, but also question ordering and how the survey itself is framed for the respondents.

• Research should be done to determine the relative importance of a variety of influences on the public’s image of the police: the personal experiences of the public, what the public learns second-hand from friends and acquaintances, and what they learn from the mass media. How influential the citizen’s prior view and expectation when they experience a personal contact or exposure to a new mass media presentation?

• What is the importance of highly publicized events on the police image – both negative events and positive ones? How long do these effects last, and how much influence do events in one community exert on the public’s image of police in another jurisdiction?

• What kinds of police agencies achieve the most positive public perceptions?

• What influence does context have on the public’s evaluation? Are patterns the same when crime is high as when it is low? When crime is rising as when it is stable or falling? Do citizens’ standards and priorities change as the context changes?

• What influence do police public relations campaigns have on the public’s image of the police? Which kinds of efforts are most successful?

• How closely correlated are objective measures of police performance (e.g., crime rates) to subjective measures (i.e., those based on public opinion surveys)? Where subjective and objective measures point to different results, what accounts for those differences?

• What impact does the public’s image of police have for the public’s actions (e.g., crime reporting, cooperating with police, participation in partnerships, obeying the law, voting and supporting funding of police programs)? What are the consequences of shifts in the police image for the tenure of police leadership?

Agenda for Future Data Collection

A program for routinely collecting data on the police image is proposed. The program would be sponsored by the IACP and conducted with the assistance of an expert research organization. The working name of this program is the Uniform Public Opinion Poll on Policing (UPOPP). It would provide for a nation-wide system of survey research coordinated and facilitated by UPOPP, but conducted by individual IACP participating agencies. Participation in the program would be voluntary. The UPOPP program would provide for high quality survey research that produced a standardized set of survey questions to be used by all participants, plus an optional set of questions designed to suit any special interests of each participating agency. The survey would be conducted annually by participating departments to allow the tracking of public image trends over time.

Under the proposed UPOPP model, the IACP would:

• Commission the development of a standard survey instrument and methodology.

• Underwrite the field testing and revision of this instrument and methodology.

• Solicit participation from IACP members

• Select and monitor a research organization that would conduct a number of activities.

The responsibilities of the research organization would include the following:

• Keep abreast of studies and survey research relevant to the UPOPP mission.

• Assist participating members in developing survey items that would deal with local issues of concern not covered in the standard survey instrument.

• Provide limited technical assistance to participating police agencies regarding the conduct of the survey (e.g., sampling, data collection, contracting with a local survey research firm to collect the data).

• Receive and archive copies of participating agencies’ survey instruments and data, establishing and enforcing technical standards for computerized data.

• Issue an annual report to the IACP that summarizes analysis from the data archive for the current year, as well as showing comparisons and trends for previous years.

Participating agencies would be responsible for collecting the data and delivering a copy to the UPOPP research organization. Participating agencies would either conduct the survey themselves or arrange for a local survey research firm to do this.

A number of issues would need to be resolved in detail, presumably choices to be made by the IACP – with the advice of the UPOPP research organization.

• The content of the standardized portion of the survey instrument,

• The content of the local-option, customized portion of the survey instrument,

• Arrangements to make participation by small agencies economically feasible,

• Scope of services provided by UPOPP research organization to participating agencies,

• Content of the UPOPP annual report and whether results for individual participating departments would be reported,

• Archiving requirements, access to data, and follow-up cross-jurisdiction data analysis, and

• Funding of the UPOPP program.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The International Association of Chiefs of Police engaged the Administration of Justice Program at George Mason University to conduct a review of existing knowledge of the public image of the police. This report presents the findings from that study.

We conceptualize the police image as falling into three general categories: over all image, outcomes, and process (Mastrofski, 1998). The over all (or general) image of police is diffuse and reflects perceptions, feelings, and evaluations that ask about the police in general, without regard to any particular characteristic or criterion. The following are examples of over all image:

• Confidence in the police

• Satisfaction with the police

• Trust in the police

• Respect for the police

• Support for the police

• Police performance in general

The benefit of such general descriptions is that they reflect an over all orientation of the public to the police. They give us a general sense of how positive or negative the public is toward the police. They are limited, however, in that they provide no indication of what it is about the police that pleases or displeases them. They are merely summary measures that cannot by themselves reveal the individual assessments and weights of those assessments that contribute to each respondent’s view. The following two types of items enable researchers to examine the internal “architecture” of the public’s image of police.

Police are expected to achieve a variety of outcomes, some of which have long been characterized as part of the police mission, and others of which have been more recently embraced under the rubric of community policing:

• reducing crime and disorder,

• reducing the fear of crime,

• solving neighborhood problems and improving the quality of life, and

• developing greater community cohesion.

Police are also expected to adhere to a wide variety of process-oriented standards. These include the following:

• Integrity – avoidance of corruption & abuse of power for personal gain, dishonesty, tolerance of corruption, abuse of power, and dishonesty among fellow officers,

• Fairness – treating people equally or equitably, regardless of race, sex, origin, etc.,

• Civility – treating people with respect,

• Responsiveness – giving people what they want, showing care and concern for their problems,

• Police presence – being available and accessible to provide police services in a timely fashion,

• Appropriate use of force – using only that force necessary to accomplish legitimate goals, and

• Competence – having the knowledge and skills necessary to do their work.

While it is safe to assume that people have opinions about the extent to which the police do these things well, there has been no systematic, comprehensive analysis of the views of the American public on all of these qualities. And we need to know the relative importance of these things to the public in shaping their over all assessment of police. When people express confidence or satisfaction with the police, how much do each of these elements exert on the over all evaluation?

It is important to know how stable the public’s image of police is over time and to know what influences fluctuations in their image. To what extent are positive/negative fluctuations a function of highly publicized events (e.g., the Rodney King incident, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Diallo case), and to what extent are they the product of social, cultural, economic, and crime trends?

This is not merely an academic question, but rather one with profound implications for the profession. If the public’s perception of the police nationwide is dramatically affected by highly publicized (even if highly localized) events, then a police executive needs to be prepared to provide a balanced picture to put the publicized event in perspective. If the event is atypical of policing, then the chief must be prepared to provide convincing evidence to the contrary (that does not appear to be merely self-serving). If it is enough of a problem to warrant widespread concern, then the chief must be in a position to show that he or she appreciates the scope of the problem and is taking action to rectify matters. Responding to such image problems requires nearly always a “reactive” approach.

If, on the other hand, the public’s view of police is affected by trends in crime, the economy, and other social indicators, then a more proactive, long-term approach may be effective. This might include alerting police leaders to the need to attend to specific image problems or opportunities that are anticipated with shifts in social, economic, or crime trends. For example, does the image of police as effective crime fighters decline when crime escalates? Are the police held responsible when drug crime and disorder increases? Does their image benefit when these problems are on the decline? When crime is on the increase, does the public place greater emphasis on the crime control function than it does when it is on the decline? When crime is declining, does the public place greater stress on police adherence to law and equal treatment across social groups?

It is also important to account for variations in the police image at any given time. It is well documented that racial and ethnic minorities tend to have a less positive image of the police than do whites. Elderly have a more positive view of police than youths. More highly educated and higher income citizens also tend to be more positive. However, we do not know much about the relative importance each group places on these qualities. For example, do older people place greater weight on the ability of police to control crime and disorder than younger people? Do younger people place greater emphasis on how the police treat citizens when dealing with them (rather than the outcomes of those police efforts)?

It would also be useful to understand how the public weights the relative importance of accomplishing desirable outcomes (e.g., lower crime rates) and police adherence to certain standards about how they go about their business (e.g., legality, courtesy, responsiveness, fairness). There is a fundamental tension in the police role that highlights the classic ends-means philosophical problem: when, if ever, do the ends justify the means? Egon Bittner’s (1970) insight about modern expectations about policing is that Western democratic culture places a high value on accomplishing lofty goals, such as peace (absence of crime and disorder), and that it prefers that whenever possible this be accomplished by peaceful means (such as negotiation, persuasion, and education). Nonetheless, society finds need to invest someone with the authority to use “dirty” – that is, coercive – methods for accomplishing peace when peaceful means may not work. The police are the institution that receives that authority, but giving them legal authority does not eradicate societal concern about the philosophical dilemma of deciding when the ends justifies the means – and when they do not. Americans place a high value on achieving peace and minimizing crime, but they also appear to be very concerned that police accomplish these things by not simply pursuing the most effective and efficient methods. They care also about how the police pursue these goals.

Two traditions in America make it difficult for police to pursue a single goal (e.g., crime reduction) without taking other, possibly conflicting goals into account (Goldstein, 1977; Miller, 1975). One is the tradition of distrust of concentrating too much power in any given public office, and finding ways to constrain or counterbalance powers that are given public officials, such as the police. The other is the tradition that police be public servants whose job is to provide their clientele things they want in the ways they want them. That is, police in America are not to be remote and isolated legal functionaries, but rather responsive and accessible servants of the public’s will: “of, by, and for the people,” to apply Lincoln’s well-known phrase.

What does this mean for the police image? Police are often targeted for reform because they are viewed as deficient in achieving the goals that are set before them, but they are also criticized and targeted for reform when their methods appear less than desirable. And when the police themselves seek support, their leaders often tend to emphasize their successes in accomplishing a particular outcome (e.g., reducing crime) or adhering to widely accepted standards (e.g., adhering strictly to legality). For example, the police leadership of New York City has in recent years sought to burnish the department’s image by claiming credit for reducing crime (Bratton, 1998). And the Federal Bureau of Investigation long ago established its credibility for incorruptibility by visibly promoting strict adherence to legal standards by its agents. An important question thus arises as we turn our attention to what shapes the image of the police that the public holds. What most burnishes the general police image and ultimately support for the police – positive feelings about police effectiveness in producing outcomes or positive feelings about how police go about their business?

At this point, no one has attempted to amass existing survey research on the public’s view of the police into a single, cohesive statement that will enable us to answer these questions. However, by conducting a comprehensive review of what is available from the existing research literature, we will be in a better position to state what is known and what remains to be determined. That is our goal in the remainder of this report.

Methodology

We began by conducting a thorough search of publicly available archives of national and major international surveys of the police image. Surveys of samples drawn on a state, county, or municipality were not considered unless they offered some valuable insights to broader questions about the police image. Several archives were used, including those housed at the University of Michigan, the Gallup, Roper, and Harris public opinion polls, and those conducted by news organizations. Where available, we obtained copies of the survey instruments (or those parts relevant to the police image) and basic characteristics of the sample (number of respondents, date conducted, how conducted). From this information, we prepared a catalog that will allow IACP to view the entire scope of existing survey data on the police image that are already available. Since this catalog would be lengthy in print, we have provided separately a database containing the information. It can be printed or it can be searched electronically. The catalog provides a useful tool for understanding previous research on the public image of the police. This resource should prove valuable in deciding on future surveys and survey items.

In addition, we also conducted a review of published research on the police image that is drawn from national (and in some cases local) public opinion surveys. This review draws primarily from academic and professional journals and research institute reports that are publicly available. Most of the existing literature focuses on the over all image of the police; surveys on the public’s image of specific aspects of police outcomes and police processes are far less frequent and systematic. The review summarizes the state of research and indicates the extent to which answers to questions raised in the initial research proposal are addressed by this research.

After reviewing and assessing all available data sets and published studies, we identify those aspects about the police image that remain unaddressed or about which there are inconclusive or conflicting findings. In the concluding chapter, we make a series of recommendations as to the kind of future research that might answer important questions about the image of policing in the United States.

Throughout the report we cite the specific sources from which we make our observations – both research reports and public opinion polls. We recognize that this may be distracting to readers desiring only to learn the results of the research, but we include the citations for two reasons: (1) some readers may wish to learn more about the specific research described, and (2) researchers whose work is cited deserve to have their work acknowledged.

CHAPTER 2

THE GENERAL IMAGE OF POLICE

I. Introduction

The public image of the police is measured a number of different ways. Sometimes surveys ask about “local” police, police in “your neighborhood” or police in “your area,” while other surveys ask about the police as a general institution. The terminology used to gauge public support also varies widely, with questions asking about whether respondents “approve of” or “trust” the police, have “confidence in” or “respect for” the police, or whether they “support” or have “favorable” views of the police. What makes these terms “general” is that the criteria or standards of performance remain unspecified. They do not ask the public to focus on either police processes or outcomes. The person answering this question could in good conscience choose both, neither, or perhaps something else entirely. And without additional information, we are unable to determine how much weight the survey respondent gives to specific aspects of police performance. Such questions are like those that ask the public to indicate whether they approve of the job that the president of the United States is doing – without specifying any particular aspect of that job. Such questions are useful, however, in that they give the survey respondent an opportunity to offer a summary that takes all of those aspects that are relevant to his or her view into account, weighting each, at least implicitly, as he or she prefers.

Not surprisingly, the terminology used in public opinion polls seems to make a difference in measuring the general image of the police. Another important element to consider in public opinion polls is whether citizens are voicing an opinion about their own previous experiences with the police, those of their neighbors, friends or family members, or simply general impressions based on a number of sources, from television and the media to opinions shared within the subcultures in which they are immersed. With all these questions in mind, it is difficult to come to terms with what constitutes the “general image” of police.

Why is the “general image” of police worth measuring? There are a number of important reasons. First, an understanding of the general image of the police among citizens provides an important indicator of support for the institution among its constituents. Understanding how the public views the police is a crucial first step in improving relationships between the police and communities. This is why community surveys are a prominent component of the community policing movement. Similarly, measurements of the public image of the police can be compared. By producing such measures, agencies can learn whether their image is improving or declining over time, or whether they are held in higher or lower esteem by their citizens than police in other communities.

Second, the general image of the police may affect the sorts of behaviors by the public that greatly interest the police. These include supporting tax initiatives or referenda designed to enhance the resources of local police agencies, to participate in co-production activities like neighborhood watch, providing the police with information useful to solving crime or improving the quality of life in neighborhoods. Communities with a poor image of the police will be less likely to support and help the police do their jobs, and more likely to file complaints, launch civil suits, rebel against the police, and produce media problems. Whether there is indeed a strong relationship between these public behaviors and the overall image of the police is an untested, but certainly plausible, thesis.

Finally, there is a small but growing body of evidence that those who view the authority exercised against them as illegitimate are more likely to rebel against authority, or in the case of the police, violate the law. For instance, research has shown that while arrest deters spouse assault among some offenders, it leads others to become even more angry and defiant, which actually increases their recidivism rates. Other research has found that domestic violence arrestees who thought they were treated fairly by police were least likely to reoffend (Paternoster, et al., 1997). While much research remains to be done on the link between the perceived legitimacy of the police and crime rates, there is some evidence to suggest that as institutions like the police lose legitimacy, an increase in crime and rebellion against the police and other legal and political institutions might result (LaFree, 1998; Tyler, 1990).

II. General versus Specific Measures

For quite some time police researchers have noted that different survey items regarding police image capture different levels of public support. For example, Reiss (1967:36) noted that citizens seem to be in a “double bind.” Citizens frequently express skepticism about police power, yet they view police power as a solution. Similarly, citizens respect the police function, but they lack trust in some of the ways police perform their duties. Finally, although they remain sympathetic the challenge of police work, citizens are hesitant to allow police discretion (Reiss, 1967).

White and Menke (1982) argue that the inconsistencies in the police image revealed in public opinion surveys result from question formatting. The proportions of citizens who reported a positive police image when presented general questions ranged from 75% to 80%. However, positive responses only ranged from about one-sixth to one-half when citizens were presented survey items that were more specific in nature.[1] White and Menke (1982:223) concluded that “general and specific items assess different universes of meaning and are not simply artifacts of meaningless comparisons of these measures.”

In sum, the available evidence suggests that survey items tapping into general evaluations of the police image will yield more favorable results. However, the evidence suggests also that a complete picture of how the public perceives the police can only be pieced together by administering both general and specific survey items to respondents. Specific items are useful in identifying the particular aspects of police performance that are least attractive to the public, which will enable police organizations to target those areas for improvement.

III. How to Measure General Police Image

In a recent review of several national polls, Shaw and his associates (1998) found that a majority of Americans hold a favorable image of the police in general, as well as the police in their communities. However, their study shows that different questions generate different levels of support for the police.

One common question used to measure general police image among citizens asks “how much confidence you, yourself, have” in the police as an institution in American society. Results from eight Gallup polls conducted annually from 1993 to 2000 show that, on average, slightly more than 56% of respondents reported either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police in general (see Exhibit 1). The percentage of those responding in positive terms ranged only slightly over time, from 52% in 1993 to 60% in 1996. The results from polls asking about citizens’ levels of confidence in the police in their community were nearly identical. The percentage of citizens with a positive police image, averaged across five national polls, was 58%. Differences in levels of confidence across the five polls, which were conducted between 1981 and 1996, appear rather marginal, ranging from 55% in 1981 and 1991, to 60% in 1985, 1995 and 1996 (see Exhibit 1). The message from these results is that a majority of Americans have confidence in the police as an institution and the police in their community, but a substantial portion are also less confident. This requires careful consideration.

It would be wrong to conclude from the polls noted above that a sizable portion of citizens have little or no confidence in the police. For example, results from the eight Gallup surveys conducted between 1993 and 2000 show that only between 10% and 12% of respondents said that they had “very little” confidence or “none at all.” A significantly higher percentage, ranging from 29% in 1996 to 35% in 1993, reported that they had “some” confidence in the police. Again, the results from the five polls asking about levels of confidence of “police in your community” are very similar. The percentage of citizens who reported that they had “very little” confidence or “none” were a small minority, ranging from 12% in 1996 to 19% in 1981. The percentage of citizens who said that they had “some” confidence in the police in their community was significantly higher (range = 24% [1981] to 31% [1991]). Overall, then, only a small minority of citizens who were polled reported that they had very little or no confidence in the police as an institution, and in the police in their community.

The key issue is what to make of the response, “some confidence.” Does that reflect positively or negatively on police? The answer, of course, depends upon one’s expectations. Perhaps one way to think about it is to consider whether a chief would be pleased to announce to the press that about one fourth of the citizen’s of his jurisdiction reported that they had “some” confidence in their police. We suspect that most chiefs – especially those who embrace community policing – aspire to higher levels of public confidence, so it seems likely that most would view an assessment of “some” confidence as a signal that improvement is possible and even, perhaps, needed.

Different questions have generated varying levels of public support for the police. Another common survey question asks citizens about their “overall opinion” of their “local police department.” The results reported by Shaw and his associates show that an overwhelming majority of respondents rate their local police favorably (see Exhibit 1). For example, a Gallup poll conducted in March 1991 revealed that 82% of respondents rated their local police department either “very favorably” or “mostly favorably.” A more recent poll, which was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1997, also showed that an overwhelming majority of citizens (81%) rated their local police in favorable terms (Shaw et al., 1998:414-415). When comparing these findings to those reported above, it appears as though survey items asking citizens about how “favorably” they rate the police in their community generate more positive results when compared to items that inquire about levels of “confidence.”

We can only speculate as to the reason for this difference. Perhaps questions asking respondents to make a “favorableness” assessment are tied more closely to the respondents’ personal, subjective expectations, whatever they may be. The question would seem to allow respondents to incorporate a broader range of police characteristics: intentions, effort, and outcome. In contrast, a question about “confidence” in police would seem to encourage respondents to focus more on objective, observable results, perhaps downplaying intention and effort. In the same way that one may have a favorable impression of a doctor with a good bedside manner, one could still be less positive about the confidence placed in him or her in curing a difficult disease.

IV. General Police Image Over Time

It is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about changes in the general image of police over time because there are few data sets that collect comparable information over time. There are several reasons why these “longitudinal” data sets are rare. The primary reason is that designing survey questions is a demanding, technical task – one that requires repeated testing among respondents to ensure that they understand the question, that it is not confusing, that the response options make sense, and that it measures the phenomenon of interest. Survey questions, or the response options that go along with them, frequently change format based on feedback from survey respondents, the whims of the researcher, a lack of awareness of prior research, or any one of several other possible explanations. Readers need to use caution when the format of a question changes even slightly, since any deviation from the trend may be due to the change in the question format rather than a change in the quantity being measured (such as the public image of the police).

To illustrate this point, consider a set of polls conducted in the early 1980s using the same questions on equivalent samples of respondents, but with a slight difference in the response options. In 1981, CBS News and the New York Times polled a national random sample of adults about the degree of confidence they had in the police in their community. The response options were: A Great Deal, Quite a Lot, Some, Very Little, and No Opinion. Fifty-five percent of respondents reported that they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. When the survey was repeated about 8 months later in 1982 by the Gallup Corporation, the response options changed: A Great Deal, Quite a Lot, Not Very Much, None at All, and No Opinion. Now 76% of respondents reported having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. A 1984 survey having the same format as the 1982 survey found similar results, with 75% of respondents reporting a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in police. Then in 1991 the original question format was adopted again, and once again in this poll, 55% of respondents had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police. It is unlikely that there was a sharp increase in public confidence in the police from 1981 to 1982, which then leveled off until 1984, followed by a gradual reduction through 1991. The more plausible interpretation is that a small adjustment in the response options provided to the survey respondents made an enormous difference in the findings. In this case, “some” was replaced with “not very much” and “very little” was replaced with “none at all.” Terminology matters.

Despite the problems with compiling a longitudinal data series, we do have some limited information on trends in the general image of the police. The data series are imperfect; they are missing data for some years, while in other instances polls were conducted twice in the same year. As we have already shown in Exhibit 1, public confidence in the police from 1993 to 2000 has not experienced dramatic changes. An average of about 56% of respondents have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police. In 1993, this figure was 52%, rising to 60% in 1996, and declining back to 54% in 2000.

There are a number of plausible explanations for these changes, such as highly publicized crises and crime trends. These influences have not been explored with rigor, but we can offer an illustration to show how one type of explanation might be explored in future research. Exhibit 2 shows the relationship between public confidence in the police and crime rates for the 1993-2000 period depicted earlier in Exhibit 1. In this chart, crime rates and public confidence rates for 1994-2000 are expressed in percentage increments above or below their 1993 levels. If declining crime rates promote higher levels of public confidence, then as the yellow and green lines (crime rates) decline, the red line (public confidence) should rise. The chart fails to show the predicted relationship across the entire time period. Even as crime declined at a fairly steady rate during these years, public confidence either remained the same or declined for five of the seven time periods. Public confidence rose only between 1994 and 1996, early in the process. What could account for this pattern? It is possible that the public adjusts its expectations over time, requiring increasingly greater levels of performance to express confidence in police. This is only speculative, however, based on a very limited illustration. We would prefer to have a much longer time period to compare these trends. Also, it is more plausible that if citizens hold police accountable for the crime rate, this relationship would be more readily discernable if we were comparing confidence in the public’s assessment of its own police department to the crime rate in that jurisdiction. Perhaps too the relationship would be clearer if we had data over this time period for the public’s assessment of the police ability to reduce crime (rather than a general image question).

It is important to note that although the general image of police is fairly good and fluctuations from year-to-year tend to be quite small, it has been declining steadily since 1996 when measured in terms of public confidence. This is a particularly noteworthy pattern when one considers the enormous investment that the police profession and taxpayers have made in community policing reforms. During this period, billions of federal dollars have been spent to promote community policing, and according to surveys of police leaders, nearly all support it. The press on community policing has been almost entirely positive (Mastrofski and Ritti, 1999). Under this onslaught of good feelings about community policing, it is remarkable that general attitudes about police have changed so little and in fact have declined over the last five years.

Another indicator of how the general image of the police is changing over time comes from a series of public opinion polls on the public’s respect toward the police. Exhibit 3 shows that in the 1960s, a period of turbulence for the American police, two public opinion polls found that an average of 74% of respondents had a great deal of respect for the police. When the polls were repeated four more times in the 1990s, the average number of respondents with a great deal of respect for the police had dropped to just under 59%. The surveys were not conducted in equal time intervals, and they skipped more than two decades, so Exhibit 3 may be masking a much more complicated story. Nonetheless, the decline in respect for police from the 1960s to the 1990s is still quite striking. It tracks fairly closely with another public opinion trend during that period, which is a decline in the percent of Americans who trust their government to do what is right (LaFree, 1998:102).[2]

The most complete longitudinal series on the general image of the police results from the yearly Monitoring the Future surveys conducted by the University of Michigan (Pastore and Maguire, 1999). Since 1987, a nationally representative sample of at least 2,300 high school seniors is asked to report “how good or bad a job is being done for the country as a whole by the police and other law enforcement agencies?” Exhibit 4 shows that the perceived performance of the police declined from 1987 to 1992, fluctuated erratically through 1996, and then began to increase again through 1999. On average, only about 31.4% of seniors surveyed during this period view the police as doing a good or very good job. The remainder, nearly 70% on average, view the police as doing a fair, poor, or very poor job. The difference between the general image of the police among random samples of high school seniors and adults is pronounced. Age is one of many variables thought to influence the public image of the police. It is to these variables that we now turn.

We conclude this section with another methodological caveat. All of the survey questions we have considered (and will consider) tend to “force” or “channel” respondents to offer an opinion, when they may have no opinion or one that was so weak as to manifest itself only because the issue was raised by the survey researcher. What this means is that potentially many respondents who had not heretofore given the question (e.g., confidence in the police) much thought are now placed in a psychological state by virtue of being questioned that they feel pressure to offer an opinion. One of the ways survey researchers have developed to relieve that artificial pressure to offer an opinion that is weak or nonexistent is to replace “no opinion” with “...or haven’t you thought much about this recently?” The latter provides those with very weakly held views to select a “face-saving” option, and it more accurately portrays the state of the public’s mind about the issue. Another option is to preface all questions about the police with a general question about how much the respondent has recently thought about the performance of the police. This allows researchers to distinguish views based on how important the topic has been to the respondent. If researchers are attempting to predict what citizens will do as a consequence of their opinions about police (e.g., how they will vote, whether they will participate in police programs, whether they will obey the law), knowing how important this topic is to each citizen would be a valuable piece of information.

V. Factors Influencing the General Image of the Police

This section considers some of the factors shaping the general image of the police. It is incomplete by design, since some of the factors thought to influence the general image are the specific components of the police image which we have not covered yet. One of the most compelling arguments about the general image of the police is that it is shaped by the outcomes the police produce (such as crime control) and the processes they use to produce those outcomes (including fairness and other aspects of the policing process). Since these will be covered in detail in the remainder of this report, for now we focus on three kinds of influences on the general image of the police: the personal characteristics of the citizen who is asked to make the evaluation,[3] the nature of the contact that the citizen has recently had with the police, and mass media portrayals of the police and crime.

Personal Characteristics of the Citizen

Research on the factors influencing the public image of the police typically draws on the “usual suspects”: age, race, sex, income and socio-economic status, victimization history (which will be explored later), and other individual level factors thought to influence attitudes more generally. Since in matters of policing, race is a crucial variable, we examine it apart from the others shortly.

Race. One of the most persistent findings in public opinion polls about the police is that whites are more satisfied with police than nonwhites. This finding has been consistent over the past four decades, emerging from dozens of studies and polls, both in the United States and abroad (Bayley and Mendelsohn, 1969; Bradley, 1998; Cao, Frank, and Cullen, 1996; Huang and Vaughn, 1996). For instance, in a study of citizen satisfaction with police in 12 cities, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1998, 90% of whites were satisfied with police, compared with 76% of blacks and 78% of those of other races (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999). These aggregate racial differences held in 10 of the 12 cities. In Madison, Wisconsin, an equal number of blacks and whites (97%) were satisfied with police, while in Tucson, Arizona more blacks (91%) were satisfied than whites (88%).

Age. Most of the research shows a positive relationship between age and attitudes toward police. Younger people routinely report less satisfaction with the police than older people (Brown and Coulter, 1983; Hindelang, 1974; Jesilow, Meyer, and Namazzi, 1995; Huang and Vaughn, 1996; Smith and Hawkins, 1973). The one study not reporting such an effect was based on a sample of juveniles, suggesting that age may matter when comparing juveniles to adults, but among juveniles, age may not matter as much (Hurst and Frank, 2000). Since this conclusion is based on one study in a single city, it should be viewed with caution. Another study reported that elderly respondents held less favorable attitudes toward the police than younger adults (Huang and Vaughn, 1996; Zevitz and Rettammel, 1990). These last two research findings suggest that the relationship between age and attitudes toward the police may be curvilinear. In practical terms, this means that juveniles are less satisfied with the police than adults, but that among juveniles, age does not matter. Then, as people age, their satisfaction with police continues to increase, until a certain age level, beyond which attitudes toward the police begin to decrease again. This is mere speculation on our part, since the research on the effects of age on satisfaction with police is not sufficiently developed to warrant firm conclusions.

Gender. The relationship between gender and satisfaction with police is unclear. At least two studies have found that males hold more positive views than females (Brown and Coulter, 1983; Thomas and Hyman, 1977). Other studies have found that females hold more positive views than males (see Huang and Vaughn, 1996, p. 35). Still another study has found that gender had no effect (Hurst and Frank, 2000). We are not sure why the effects of gender are so erratic across different studies.

Socio-economic Status. Poorer people, and those from lower socio-economic classes tend to report less satisfaction with police than those who are wealthier. For instance, Benson (1981) found that respondents from lower social classes were less satisfied with police. Similarly, Brown and Coulter (1983) found that income and education both had a positive effect on satisfaction with treatment by the police (a variable that can be viewed as both an indicator of the general image of the police and as an indicator of the image associated specifically with police process). However, both Hindelang (1974) and Jesilow, Meyer, and Namazzi (1995) report that education had no effect on attitudes toward police. Decker (1981) notes an important concern about the role of socio-economic status (SES). As we will discuss shortly with regard to race, it is not clear whether it is the individual’s socio-economic status that influences attitudes toward police, whether it is the status of the neighborhood, or whether these two variables interact. As we will demonstrate shortly, if SES works in the same fashion as race, neighborhood effects may be more important than individual attributes like SES.

Other influences. Race, age, gender, and SES are the individual variables most commonly considered in research on citizen satisfaction with police. Nonetheless, there are other scattered research findings that may be important to consider. For instance, several researchers have found that people living in the suburbs have better attitudes toward the police than people living in urban areas (Hindelang, 1974; Hurst and Frank, 2000; Thomas and Hyman, 1977). Another study confirms what might be viewed as common sense, that juveniles with a commitment to delinquent norms are less satisfied with police (Leiber, Nalla, and Farnworth, 1998).

Social scientists have not confirmed what these kinds of differences mean, but there are two theoretical approaches worth considering. One is that people with different characteristics have different experiences and that their opinions about the police are grounded in the objective reality of those experiences. If youths are more likely to be stopped, searched, cited, arrested, and warned than elderly people, then their negative views of police are perfectly understandable as an outgrowth of the different experiences of these two groups. The other theoretical perspective is that people with different backgrounds have different expectations or standards for police – and different ways to interpret events. If a person brings a negative preconception of the police to an experience, then they may be more inclined to focus on police actions that are consistent with that viewpoint and ignore those which are not, or they may simply interpret a given police action in a way that is consistent with that viewpoint.

Neither of the above theories has been thoroughly tested. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that racial differences in attitudes toward the police may not be a simple function of individual race, but that they are also influenced by broader social structural issues like (1) subcultural attitudes toward the police that are independent of individual experiences, and (2) the characteristics of the neighborhoods where respondents live. Decker (1981) found that community level predictors of individual attitudes toward the police included neighborhood culture and community beliefs about the police. Apple and O’Brien (1983:83) found that "an increase in the number of blacks in the neighborhood increases the opportunity for blacks to associate with others who have negative attitudes toward the police, and this results in an overall increase in their negative sentiment toward the police." Jesilow, Meyer, and Namazzi (1995) found that not liking things about one's neighborhood was associated with negative attitudes about the police. Leiber, Nalla, and Farnworth (1998:169) concluded that “the imposition of legal authority and social control in certain neighborhoods engenders a pervasive resentment and resistance, and that youthful residents of those neighborhoods harbor a general disrespect for the law itself."

Neighborhood Effects. The most striking (and convincing) evidence for neighborhood effects comes from a massive study called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Sampson and Bartusch (1999) found that:

Once neighborhood economic disadvantage is taken into account, blacks' views are found to be similar to whites'. Blacks appear to be more cynical toward or dissatisfied with the police only because they are more likely to live where disadvantage is concentrated. Even in neighborhoods where the rate of violent crime is high, there is no difference between the races in attitudes toward the police. Racial differences disappear when neighborhood context is considered. Thus, residents' estrangement from the police is better explained by neighborhood context than race.

Although this is one of the largest and most carefully constructed studies of attitudes toward the police, it is still important to keep in mind that it is based on only one city. One of the enduring lessons of social science is that research evidence – even good research evidence – needs to be replicated over place and time before it can be generalized.

Sampson and Bartusch’s (1999) findings on the relationship between attitudes toward police and the legitimacy of the law also highlight a theme pointed out by researchers in the past. The public’s image of the police is often part of a larger attitudinal complex toward social, legal, and political institutions (LaFree, 1998). For instance, Benson (1981) found that political alienation influences ratings of the police, but the effect varies across social class and perceived integrity of the police. Thus, those who are poor and/or nonwhite may not only express unfavorable opinions toward the police, but may feel alienated from the political process more generally. Brown and Coulter (1983) found that citizens who rate the quality of local government higher tend to be more satisfied with the police. Albrecht and Green (1977) found that attitudes toward the police are strongly related to attitudes toward attorneys, judges, courts, and the legal system. Attitudes toward the police are also related to attitudes toward the larger political system, though the relationship is not as strong. Finally, attitudes toward the police are also related to degree of involvement in the political system, though this relationship is the weakest of those considered. Albrecht and Green (1977: 81) conclude that

The same respondents who express negativism toward their local police also feel generally alienated from the legal and political process and more cynical about the effectiveness of the operation of that process, especially in terms of its relationship to them and others like them....The implications are both clear and important. Programs designed to change public attitudes toward the police are not going to be generally successful unless they consider the broader, fundamental value system of which these attitudes are a part.

With this notion in mind, we will later (in section VI) examine the image of the police compared with other major social institutions.

Nature of the Citizen’s Recent Contact with Police

One way to think about the influences on the public’s general image of the police is to consider the different ways in which members of the public might acquire their impressions. People may acquire their images from direct personal experience – their contacts with the police. They may also acquire them indirectly through people with whom they associate – family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. And people may acquire their images of the police through the mass media – news, entertainment, and educational. A fair amount of survey research has focused on the impact of people’s direct experiences with the police on their general attitudes toward the police (Dean, 1980; Gibson, 1989; Koenig, 1980; Roberts and Stalans, 1997:149-152; Scaglion and Condon, Tyler, 1990). The general thrust of this research is that how citizens experience the police personally shows a significant impact on their general assessment of the police. Positive experiences are associated with a positive image and negative experiences with a negative image. Negative experiences appear to have a more powerful effect than positive experiences. The extent of the difference in impact between positive and negative contacts varies with the type of measure of general support used by the researcher and the composition of the survey sample.[4]

One recent study provides a detailed analysis of different aspects of the citizen’s contact experience with police and its impact on the citizen’s general level of satisfaction with the police department. Reisig and Chandek (2001) surveyed a sample of citizens who had recently had contact with police in a Midwestern city. They considered a number of possible influences on the citizen’s evaluation, including the level of courtesy/friendliness of the officer, the citizen’s age, sex, and race. The researchers found that the strongest predictor of the citizen’s satisfaction with the police department in general was how courteous/friendly the officer was with the citizen. This held for both traffic stops, where the citizen’s contact was involuntary and breaking-and-entering encounters, where the contact was at the citizen’s request. Interestingly, minority citizens tended to rate police significantly lower than white citizens in traffic stops, but the effects of the officer’s demeanor toward the citizen was over three times more powerful as a predictor of the citizen’s over-all evaluation of the police department generally. The citizen’s race was not a significant predictor of the over-all evaluation of police respondents gave in breaking-and-entering contacts. The researchers expected that the citizen’s expectations about what services the police would provide would exert an influence on their general evaluations of the police.[5] They hypothesized that if the police performed more service than expected, citizens would form a more positive general impression of the police, and if they gave less than expected, they would form a more negative overall impression. They found that although this was true for the evaluations that citizens gave for the specific police encounter, that effect did not transfer to their general impressions of the department.

The above studies examined the impact of the public’s specific contacts with police on their general views of police, but it is also possible, and indeed likely, that people’s general views of police influence the way they evaluate a specific experience. Two studies have examined this question, and both have found that prior general (sometimes called “global”) views of police have a stronger influence on the public’s evaluations of a specific contact with police than their evaluation of a specific contact has on the subsequent general evaluation of police (Brandl et al., 1994; Tyler, 1990). One research team concluded,

These findings are consistent with the proposition that citizens’ evaluations of their personal experiences with the police are affected by stereotyping and selective perception; those who hold generally favorable views of the police are more likely to evaluate their contacts with the police favorably, and those who hold generally unfavorable views are more likely to evaluate their contacts unfavorably (Brandl et al., 1994:131).

As valuable as police contact studies are, they overlook one important fact. The vast majority of Americans rarely have direct contact with the police, which means that these people will be drawing heavily on other sources to form their impressions of the police. A large 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey shows that 79 percent of the respondents reported no face-to-face contact with the police in the previous year, and only 4 percent reported more than one contact (see Exhibit 5) (Langan et al., 2001). And the vast majority of the contacts people did have were routine traffic stops and requests for assistance. Relatively few involved the citizen as a suspect or victim in a serious crime or other emergency. So, the vast majority of the American public has not had recent contact with the police and of those few who have had recent contact, their experiences were not the sort of dramatic situations in which their safety was immediately threatened or their freedom and reputations were at stake. These people’s general impressions of the police when interviewed were thus probably heavily influenced by (a) memories of their own experiences with police in the more distant past, and (b) impressions given directly by individuals with whom they have frequent contact, and (c) impressions given by the mass media.

We did not find survey research pertaining to category b above, but a few important implications can be drawn from common sense. First, a police-citizen encounter can have an impact that goes well beyond the immediate public participants if those participants share their accounts and views of those experiences with their friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. To take an extreme case, if the minister of a church is treated rudely by a police officer, there is tremendous potential to magnify the effects of that single event many-fold because of the minister’s access to large numbers of the public and his or her status among them. As community policing continues to grow in popularity, many police agencies are in the business of strengthening the potential influence of this kind of secondary impression of the police. Under community policing, neighborhood and community groups are encouraged to pay attention to police policies and practices, to provide guidance as to community preferences, and even to participate in some police programs. This approach is designed to create more public forums in which members of the public share their past experiences and impressions of the police (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). Where this occurs, results – both positive and negative – will be magnified by these secondary sources of public impression.

Mass Media Portrayals of Police and Crime

We found a small body of research on the impressions of police that are formed from mass media presentations. At the outset we stress that the number of such studies is small and the number of unanswered questions is large, so conclusions about mass media influences on the public’s image of police are necessarily quite tentative. We divide our discussion into two parts: news media and entertainment media.

Before discussing evidence on each, we briefly describe three theoretical approaches for explaining mass media effects on public attitudes about institutions such as the police (Fox and Van Sickel, 2001:6-8). The “hypodermic needle” theory assumes that the public takes in media presentations like a drug, which produces powerful and long-term effects on their views of institutions such as the police. Members of the public are viewed as independent consumers of these media presentations, which they use to answer questions about the police and from which they formulate attitudes and perceptions of the police. The “limited effects” theory also assumes that the public uses the media for information, but it argues that individuals evaluate that information in the context of what they know from other sources – such as direct contact, family, friends, etc. These pre-existing and more-or-less independent impressions are believed to constitute powerful influences with which media images must contend in the competition for influencing the public’s views of the police. Under these circumstances, the effects of the mass media are expected to be present, but limited. The “subtle/minimal effects” theory falls in between the “hypodermic needle” and “subtle/minimal effects” theories. Here, the hypothesized media effects are neither overwhelming nor minimal, but rather work in special ways by: (a) agenda setting – instructing the public in what to think about as the most important issues (e.g., whether policing is an important issue at a given time and what aspects are important), (b) priming – associating people or institutions with particular issues (e.g., associating the police with crime fighting), and (c) framing – shaping how to think about a given issue by either identifying general trends or covering specific events (e.g., how often the police use excessive force in dealing with suspects). Thus, all three theories posit that the mass media influence the public’s views, although in different ways and to different degrees. Evidence relevant to all three approaches can be found in research, but evidence is mixed for all three models.

News Media Influences. The prominence of crime in the news and the importance of the police as a source of news about crime inevitably focuses public attention on the role of the police as crime fighters. Indeed, surveys of the public indicate that up to 95 percent of the public consider the mass media as their main source of information about crime (Surette, 1998:197). Most news stories about police are focused on a specific crime, crime trends, or crime problems, and the police are rarely the focus of the report. Thus, a lot of news places police in the background of the story, mentioning them only inasmuch as they describe what they are doing about a crime event or larger crime issue (Surette, 1998:69-70). These news stories rarely provide a larger historical, sociological, or political context or interpretation that would place the story’s topic in a broader perspective. Thus, for example, most stories about the police shooting of Diallo in New York failed to provide a broader discussion of long-term trends and cross-city comparisons in the police use of lethal force (which was declining at the time in New York and which placed New York below many other large American cities in the rate of police shootings). Consumers of the news are thus left to form their own impressions, and according to one researcher, the implicit message stresses the inability to catch offenders – but police are portrayed as doing at least a fair job, while courts and corrections do poorly (Graber, 1980:74-83). If the agenda-setting properties of news media influence are valid under the “framing” theory, then one would expect that the public generally would evaluate police primarily according to their ability to fight crime. However, as we will later show, a number of studies suggest that – at least in the 1990s – the public appears to give the processes of policing (e.g., how police treat citizens they encounter) much greater priority than crime control in calculating their overall evaluation of the police.

Given the luke-warm image of police as crime fighters provided by the news media, it is remarkable that support for the police is as high as it is, leading one scholar to speculate that although the media message is that the system does not work well, it is still presented as “the best hope against crime” (Surette, 1998:226). By way of offering a speculative explanation, we suggest that a careful reading of news stories about the police would show that although the over all media image of police may reflect poorly on police ability to achieve crime control, these stories – either explicitly or implicitly – present the police as well-motivated and trying to “do the right thing.” It may be the inferences the public makes about police objectives and motivations that produce the positive general assessments about police that routinely appear in national surveys.

Recently some researchers have identified a trend in news media coverage of the criminal justice process that they characterize as “tabloid justice” (Fox and Van Sickel, 2001). They argue that mass media have entered a time when they concentrate on the “sensationalistic, personal, lurid, and tawdry details of unusual and high-profile trials and investigations” (p. 3). This is characterized by three trends observed in both mainstream and emerging news media formats: (a) treating news as entertainment, (b) a proliferation or “frenzy” of media coverage of specific cases, and (c) an increasingly attentive public that uses this information to understand and evaluate the criminal justice system (that is, the hypodermic needle model of mass media influence). Although much of the empirical research focuses on the legal system generally and especially on cases at the stage of trial, the researchers do present some results relevant to police.

First the researchers tested the effects of “priming” respondents to a national survey to certain “tabloid” cases of the 1990s by asking them questions about their familiarity with those cases.[6] The researchers assumed that virtually all of the respondents’ knowledge of these cases would come from the news media. The researchers found that respondents who were first questioned about these cases revealed in a subsequent question that they expressed lower levels of confidence in the police than those who were asked about tabloid questions after being asked about their confidence in the police (Fox and Van Sickel, 2001:132). Next the researchers directly asked the survey respondents about whether these cases had influenced their confidence in the police. In four of the five tabloid cases analyzed in this part of the study, the pattern of responses indicated that there was a net reduction in confidence. The O. J. Simpson case was the most extreme, 62 percent reporting a loss of confidence, 5 percent reporting an increase and 30 percent reporting no change. The over all impact of all of the tabloid cases discussed with survey respondents showed a net decline in confidence in the police of 23 percent attributed to knowledge of tabloid cases.

The researchers concluded that exposure to these cases (presumably as a result of news coverage) reduced the legitimacy of the police, and they attribute the negative coverage of tabloid-style journalism. Actually, it seems more appropriate to say that when people were reminded of these cases and asked to consider their impact, those very people tended to believe that it reduced their confidence in police. It is quite possible that this research overstates the scope of this effect – for two reasons. First, the survey mentioned only tabloid stories about police to the respondents and did not mention any other kinds of media coverage that might have predisposed the respondents to feel more positive about the police. That is, the survey itself probably does not accurately replicate how people actually consume and process news stories, which presumably would include a wider variety of stories. Second, the respondents themselves may not have an accurate view of how these stories actually affected their own confidence in the police. Simply by asking the question, the researchers may have created in the respondents’ minds an inclination to make a judgment one way or the other, when in fact the effect was small, nonexistent, or even contrary to what they believe about themselves. In the final analysis, it is not unreasonable to suppose that people exposed to negative mass media images will have lower evaluations of the police, but it remains to be demonstrated just how extensive this exposure is, and how influential media images are compared to other sources of information.

Entertainment Media Influences. We consider entertainment media to include accounts of police work through various communications media (print, broadcast, recording) that are advertised as fiction or explicit entertainment (e.g., music, video games). Also included are books, film, and television shows that claim to present the reality of police work in an entertainment context. These are sometimes called “reality TV” or “info-tainment.” We have not found an empirical literature on the effects of entertainment media on public attitudes toward the police, although there is a larger literature on the consumption of entertainment media (especially television) on such things as fear of crime. The general conclusion is that television consumption is associated with greater fear of crime and violence and greater cynicism and distrust in social attitudes (Surette, 1998:212). The effects are not uniform, however, and are especially related to the credibility of the information source (suggesting the importance of examining the effects of the many “reality” police shows now available). Print media have a greater influence on people’s knowledge about crime and their adoption of crime prevention actions, likely due to differences in content and style of presentation associated with each type of medium and perhaps also differences in who tends to consume each type of medium.

Although we do not present findings on the relationship of entertainment media consumption on police specifically, we are able to report some general findings on the nature of entertainment media content. Studies of entertainment media content repeatedly demonstrate the obvious: the entertainment media present an extremely distorted view of the nature of police work, one that stresses crime fighting, police violence, and individualism (as exemplified by Dirty Harry) (Surette, 1998: 40-43). The entertainment media present police as effective in solving, but not preventing, crime and as doing incident driven, not community- and problem-oriented work. Effective law enforcement officers in the entertainment media are those who eschew routine methods, often violating rules and laws, and take exceptional measures to solve cases (involving weapons and highly sophisticated technology). Private investigators and amateur private citizens prove far more successful in solving television crimes than the police. Television police are more positively presented than television attorneys, judges, and corrections officers, but for every heroic officer portrayal, two others are incompetent and two others break the law (Lichter and Lichter, 1983). Because of the focus on the exceptional and spectacular, one crime and media expert concluded,

Whatever the [entertainment] media show is the opposite of what is true. In every subject category – crimes, criminals, crime fighters, the investigation of crimes, arrests, the processing and disposition of cases – the entertainment media present a world of crime and justice that is not found in reality. Whatever the truth about crime and violence and the criminal justice system in America, the entertainment media seem determined to project the opposite. Their wildly inaccurate and inevitably fragmentary images provide a distorted reflection of crime within society and an equally distorted reflection of the criminal justice system’s response to crime. The lack of realistic information further mystifies the criminal justice system, exacerbating the public’s lack of understanding of it while constructing a perverse topsy-turvy reality of it (Surette, 1998:47).

Police researchers have devoted little attention to the second-hand accounts that may influence the police image. For example, it would be valuable to know just how much and in what ways second-hand accounts of policing affect the general impressions of citizens who have infrequent contact with the police as opposed to those who have frequent contact. A working hypothesis is that citizens who have frequent direct contact – or who have friends and acquaintances who report frequent direct contact – will be much less affected by both positive and negative entertainment media portrayals than those who experience such direct or second-hand contact infrequently. The underlying assumption of this hypothesis is that different sources of information compete with each other for influence. An alternative hypothesis is that consumers of the media selectively perceive events they observe in both the entertainment media and their personal experiences. Under these conditions, the hypothesis would be that citizens would focus on information in both the media and their experiences that tend to reinforce already existing preconceptions.

Of course, entertainment media may play an important role in framing citizens’ impressions and expectations about their police. Movies, television shows, and novels that present police in a positive light can be expected to predispose citizens more positively toward police generally – especially those with little direct personal contact with police. The proliferation of “reality TV” programs that show video clips of police-citizen interactions may play an especially important role in shaping the public’s view of police in recent years (Surette, 1998). However, it is not clear whether these “reality TV” portrayals tend to produce more positive or negative images of the police.

VI. Police Image Compared to Other Major Social Institutions

If attitudes toward the police are enmeshed in a larger complex of attitudes toward government, law, politics, and other social institutions, how well do the police fare in comparison with these other institutions? Polling organizations have been asking Americans about their confidence in various social institutions for a number of years. Only in 1993 were the police added to this list, which now contains 13 institutions. Since 1993, the police have inspired either the second or third most confidence of all the institutions listed. During that period, the public expressed the most confidence in the military every year, with almost 65% of respondents on average reporting either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. Out of the eight years with available data, the police came in third place four times, second place three times, and tied for second place once. In terms of public confidence, the police are in a neck-and-neck race for second place with the church and organized religion; during the previous eight years, 56.5% of respondents, on average, report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police, compared with 56.25% for the church and organized religion, 1999).

One observation about these data is noteworthy. While more than 56% of respondents expressed confidence in the police in 2000, only 24% expressed confidence in the criminal justice system. This was the lowest rating in the list, tied only with Congress. It is unknown why the police, a major component of the criminal justice system, fare much better in the eyes of the public than the criminal justice system as a whole. One possibility is that respondents may associate the criminal justice system with lawyers. As we will show later, lawyers are viewed by the public as among the least honest and ethical professionals, generating levels of confidence similar to those who sell cars or insurance. One possibility is that the public is responding to the mission and motivations they attribute to police. If the police mission is seen as bringing wrongdoers to justice and helping those who are wronged, then that is a simpler, more easily conceived mission than one for the criminal justice system. The courts in particular, operate in theory at least as an adversarial system in which one side tries to convict wrongdoers and the other attempts to get them acquitted or minimize their punishment. Such a construction has a zero-sum quality, where the more one side wins, the more the other loses. Faced with assessing a more complex role, perhaps many citizens select one aspect or the other, and invariably find the courts wanting when they attempt to accomplish both simultaneously.

Finally, a recent Roper survey suggests that the American people find that the police are among the top five values for services received from their tax dollars (Roper, 2001). Fifty-seven percent of the survey respondents rated police/law enforcement as an “excellent” or “good” value. The services ranking higher than police (from top to bottom) were military defense (63), medical and technological research (61), public television (58).[7]

VII. Police Image from Community Surveys

Numerous municipal police agencies around the country conduct community surveys to assess citizen attitudes toward issues related to crime and justice. Items asking respondents about their overall image of their local police are almost always included in these surveys. It is not uncommon for local police departments to collaborate with criminal justice researchers with university affiliations when conducting community surveys. These working relationships are usually mutually beneficial. On the one hand, police executives are provided technical assistance in constructing and administering the survey, as well as aid in data analysis and in interpreting results. On the other, criminal justice researchers gain access to the survey data to assess research hypotheses that may eventually appear in academic journals. Research articles investigating citizen attitudes toward the police are fairly common. For the most part, these surveys have consistently revealed a high level of support for local police. As one might imagine, however, the quality of these research reports varies considerably.

Instead of wading through a vast number of research articles of varying quality, we can gain a good understanding of how citizens feel about the police in their cities by looking to a recent study conducted by the Census Bureau under the auspices of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)(Smith et al., 1999). Using rigorous survey research methods, the Census Bureau conducted a large number of telephone surveys in 1998. The sample consisted of 12 cities, which were located throughout the United States, whose police departments community policing initiatives were at different stages of development. Among other questions, citizens were asked, “In general, how satisfied are you with the police who serve your neighborhood?” Results from the survey showed quite clearly that a large majority of citizens residing in each city were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their local police department (see Exhibit 6). The percentage of citizens responding positively to the question ranged from a high of 97% (Madison, WI) to a low of 78% (Washington, D.C.). Given the diversity of communities in this sample, the relatively small range in satisfaction levels is remarkable. Eight of the twelve departments fall within the 84-89 percent satisfaction range. The average satisfaction score across the 12 cities was 85% (Smith et al., 1999:25). In sum, the most reliable available evidence suggests that a considerable majority of citizens from city to city evaluate their local police in favorable terms.

To interpret these highly favorable ratings of local police service to the respondent’s own neighborhood, we should keep several things in mind. First, it is a well established pattern that Americans tend to evaluate specific individuals who serve or represent them more positively than they do the institutions in which those public officials work. For example, while Congress routinely receives low marks of respect and satisfaction, survey respondents also routinely rate their own congressperson much higher. Second, the phrasing of the particular question used in the twelve-city survey (focusing on “satisfaction”) is, as we have shown earlier, more likely to elicit a positive response than a question phrased about “confidence in” the police.

Of course, we would expect more variation with a larger sample that included a wider range of departments by size, region, and other characteristics. Even so, the modest amount of variation across this rather diverse sample is surprising if one expects that public opinion reflects differences in objective levels of performance. If, as many police professionals assume, there is a great difference in the quality of policing among communities, why is this not