Police-Community Trust: The Overlooked Perspective of Police Trust in the Public

Many studies have looked at the public’s trust in the police, but very few have examined police trust in the public. Moreover, those studies that have examined police trust in the public only analyze components of trust, rather than comprehensively evaluating the construct. Based on Mayer Davis, and Schoorman’s (1995) model of trust, two studies were conducted. The first study created scales measuring the antecedents of trust (i.e., perceptions of ability, benevolence, and integrity) and levels of trust police have in the public based on a survey of 990 police officers from across the United States. It found that police officers’ trust in the public is predicted by their perceptions of the antecedents of trust and their propensity to trust others. The second study used these measures as well as supervisors’ evaluations and archival performance data in a longitudinal study of 135 police officers. It found that officers who trusted the public more engaged in more proactive policing and made more arrests. Th...