Does Community Policing Build Trust in Police and Reduce Crime? Evidence from Six Coordinated Field Experiments in the Global South (2021)

Is it possible to reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between police and citizens? Community policing is a celebrated reform with that aim, now adopted on every continent. Yet, the evidence base is limited, studying reform components in isolation in a limited set of countries, and largely silent on citizen-police trust. We designed six field experiments with Global South police agencies to study locally-designed models of community policing, with coordinated measures of crime and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens and police. In a preregistered meta analysis, we find that these interventions led to mixed implementation, largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and did not reduce crime. Societies may need to implement structural changes first for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed.

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Authors

Dr. Ali Cheema IDEAS

Ahsan Zia Farooqui

Keywords

• Citizen-Police Relations
• Community Policing
• Crime

Cite this publication

Blair, G., Weinstein, J., Christia, F., Arias, E., Badran, E., Blair, R., & Wilke, A. (2021). Does Community Policing Build Trust in Police and Reduce Crime? Evidence from Six Coordinated Field Experiments in the Global South. Science, 374 (6571).

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