How does community policing affect police attitudes? An experimental test and a theory of bureaucrat-citizen contact

Abstract

In contrast to the expansive work on how community policing affects citizens' attitudes towards police, existing research says little about how community policing affects officers' attitudes towards citizens. We examine officer-facing outcomes using an experiment in the Philippines, in which a random subset of a province's 705 officers were assigned to intensive community policing activities for seven months. Treatment officers saw improved understanding of citizen concerns, but did not develop greater empathy or trust towards civilians, nor an increased sense of accountability for citizen-facing misconduct. We build from the experiment to develop an inductive theory of bureaucrat-citizen contact, relying on qualitative observations and exploratory analyses of heterogeneous effects. We propose that contact with citizens is only likely to improve attitudes among frontline bureaucrats who are not ex-ante embedded in their communities. Moreover, contact may have negative effects when it reveals threats to bureaucrats' personal safety.

Cite

@article{haim2025community,
author  = {Dotan Haim and Matthew Nanes and Nico Ravanilla},
title   = {How does community policing affect police attitudes? An experimental test and a theory of bureaucrat-citizen contact},
journal = {American Political Science Review},
year    = {2025},
volume  = {119},
number  = {4},
pages   = {1983--2001},
doi     = {10.1017/S000305542400145X}
}