Police-community relations

High-profile police use-of-force events, like the deaths of Trevon Martin, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and George Floyd, have increased scrutiny towards law enforcement, and many believe that racial disparities in the justice system are caused by biased decision-making. The subsequent protests and civil unrest have furthered the divide between the police and members of the public, which has damaged police legitimacy and led to depolicing and militarization. This study pilot tests the impact of implicit bias on decision-making for a student sample with a decision-making simulator and an experimental design with random assignment. Simulated police-public contacts, substantively, were found to be very complex and largely guided by legal factors; however, stressful stimuli can affect decision-making. The forthcoming protocol and methodology, moreover, provide insight to decision-making and create a framework to guide future research.

Police department attitudes and behaviors associated with faithfully implementing community policing may determine its success for combating social disorganization. The literature review presents a background for understanding community policing and its link to the theory of social disorganization. It is hypothesized that supportive attitudes toward community policing will produce behaviors consistent with its application that may help in combating the disadvantages of social disorganization. Secondhand public data of a two-part community policing survey is used to test each hypothesis. Analysis procedures used for this test consist of reliability comparisons, bivariate correlation and finally OLS regression. The results of this thesis indicate a promising causal relationship between supportive attitudes playing a role in shaping behaviors consistent with the performance of community policing techniques. The results also reveal that police agencies that have supportive attitudes toward community oriented policing also perceive that it can have a positive impact in combating social disorganization.