Verified by 
By David Rand, Kyle Peyton, and Michael Sierra-Arévalo
How community policing can improve the public’s attitudes toward the police
We are in the midst of a crisis of police legitimacy in America. Each case of police brutality and shooting of an unarmed civilian cause more people to lose trust in the police and to question whether officers are really there to serve and protect. Without public trust, how can the police effectively do their job?
In response to this crisis, some police officials and policymakers have promoted the use of community-oriented policing (COP), which emphasizes positive, nonenforcement contact with the public to build trust and police legitimacy. COP dates back to the 1970s and has involved things like foot patrols, community meetings, neighborhood watches, and door-to-door visits. The idea is simple: If interactions with the police don’t always involve a problem—much less punishment of some kind—then the public may come to trust the police and, hopefully, cooperate with them in the future to report and solve crimes.
Despite massive investments in COP over the past several decades, this strategy suffers from a key problem: There isn’t strong evidence that it actually works. This is because existing studies have largely been correlational. For example, some studies compared departments that use COP to those that don’t; and these departments clearly differ in more ways than just their use of COP. Furthermore, there is little consistency in how departments actually implement COP, making comparisons all the more difficult. Given the popularity of COP and the millions of dollars spent on COP initiatives across the U.S., it is vital to confirm if positive COP interactions move the needle on trust and legitimacy.
In a recent study, we addressed this question in cooperation with the New Haven Police Department. We conducted a first-of-its-kind, randomized field experiment to finally test whether a single nonenforcement contact—the kind at the heart of community-oriented policing—actually causes people to view the police differently.
The short answer is that COP can work. And it can work particularly well in communities with high levels of distrust of the police.
The randomized field experiment study
Our study took place in the city of New Haven, CT, and began with a general opinion survey that went out to thousands of randomly selected residents. To avoid biasing the survey by only asking questions about police, we included questions about police alongside questions related to other parts of the city government.
For the police-related questions, we asked respondents about issues such as whether they feel the police make fair and impartial decisions and if they have confidence that the police do their job well. We also asked if they would cooperate with the police if they had knowledge of a suspect’s location and if they would comply with an officer’s instruction.
Half of the people in the first survey were then randomly selected to get an unannounced visit from a uniformed member of the New Haven Police Department. During these visits, the officer would knock on the door, introduce themselves, explain that this was a non-enforcement community policing visit, and ask residents about any issues they had in the neighborhood. They ended the visit by giving residents personalized business cards with their cell numbers hand-written in a designated area.
After the door-to-door visits, we conducted follow-up surveys of people who received a COP visit and those who did not, and we analyzed the responses.
Striking results
We were not sure about what we would find. With so much distrust of police, could a single visit really make a difference? Might those visits actually antagonize residents? Could they make things worse?
Our results show that the community policing visits did, in fact, have a significant positive impact. The residents who had COP interactions reported a much better view of the police afterward on all of the issues we measured, including perceptions of police legitimacy and a willingness to cooperate with the police. We also found that a COP visit led to a slight decrease in support of body-worn cameras and an increase in support of hiring additional police officers.
Importantly, we found that the COP intervention had nearly twice as large of an effect on black residents as it did among white residents. Further, the visits had the strongest effects among individuals who held the most negative views toward police prior to the COP visit.
This study provides the strongest evidence to date in support of the power of COP to improve relationships between police and the communities they serve. These broad effects of positive contact are especially important in light of the current crisis of police legitimacy, particularly within minority communities where a history of mistreatment by police has perpetuated distrust that frustrates police-community partnerships and negatively affects public safety.
Of course, community policing is not a panacea for all problems. Issues of police brutality and inadequate systems of police accountability are real and must receive attention and well-designed solutions. Nonetheless, our study suggests that community policing can be a valuable tool to promote the cooperative relationships between the police and the public that must be front and center for all departments their officers.
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Kyle Peyton is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Michael Sierra-Arévalo is an Assistant Professor in the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. They are coauthors of “A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy,” which was published by PNAS.
