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College Students’ Satisfaction with Police Services in Taiwan

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was threefold: First, it explored the incidence of police-college student confrontations in Taiwan over the course of the three decades following the abolition of martial law in 1987. Second, it examined the correlates of satisfaction with police services among college students. Third, and most importantly, a Chinese cultural value I characterize as benevolent sympathy was introduced and integrated into a theoretical framework developed in Western societies to assess citizen satisfaction with police work. Using survey data collected from 688 college students across Taiwan, results derived from a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses showed that benevolent sympathy plays a significant role in the explanation of satisfaction with police services among these students. In addition, neighborhood disorder, collective efficacy, fear of crime, voluntary contact experience and nature of locality produced significant impacts even after controlling for demographic background characteristics. The public policy implications of the findings included the following: (1) Educators in college-level institutions might benefit from reviewing the curriculum of their academic programs and include the purposeful cultivation of good virtues such as benevolent sympathy in their courses; (2) Police administrators should likely institute training programs designed to improve communication skills, promote professional knowledge, and enhance neighborhood-specific services in sworn police officer training programs (particularly for officers serving in rural areas); (3) Police agencies should pay more attention to their behaviors and services in neighborhoods where disorder crimes and higher levels of fear exist; and (4) To enhance quality of police services to college students in particular, police departments need to take greater advantage of the effectiveness of the Internet for communicating with this population.

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Notes

  1. In reflection of the fact that the concepts of benevolent sympathy and empathy are similar, it is noteworthy that de Waal (1996) argued that empathy along with sympathy constitute one of the pillars of human morality. Thus, it would seem that sympathy, empathy, and morality are intimately linked in human, norm-governed social systems. In the study published by Posick et al. (2014). while there has been no agreement reached among scholars regarding the optimal conceptualization and measurement of empathy, Posick and his colleagues adopted a measure featuring three items developed by Galinski and Sonenstein (2011) to capture this construct. Their construct entails asking survey respondents to indicate their level of agreement with the following three statements: (1) I am sympathetic, (2) I am sensitive to the needs of others, and (3) I am compassionate. (α = 0.82).

  2. In this study, the locality was treated as an important predictor since the demographics and population composition varied in those cities and county, and urban/rural location really matters when rating police performance (Brown and Benedict 2002). Except for Chiayi County, the four cities are municipalities directly under the jurisdiction of the central government. Among them, Taipei city, a well-developed urban core area and the two universities sampled from it are in the downtown area and hence feature no differences in population and business activity compositions. While New Taipei City is the biggest city with 3.5 million people, the population composition varies substantially across its 29 districts. In this regard, a university sampled from this city is located in a rural district. Similar to New Taipei city, Kaohsiung and Tainan cities embrace urban and rural areas, and the two universities sampled from them are located in downtown areas. The final one sampled from Chiayi county, which is located in a rural area.

  3. While it is possible that some students may have used their home police as a reference rather than the police where they are attending college, this is not likely the case very often. The college student survey was conducted during the semester rather than during summer/winter break periods, and the survey instrument and instruction given prior to the administration of the survey included specific directions regarding the local police around the university as the referent for respondent assessments.

  4. According to statistics reported monthly by the Taiwan Ministry of Education’s website (www.edu.tw), the ratios of gender (male to female) and academic major (human and social science to natural science) of all college students are 51:49 and 56: 44, respectively. In addition, the mode of college students’ age is 21 years old. The differences of gender, major, and age between sample size and population were examined with chi-square statistics. Results indicated that, except for age, while gender is significantly biased (chi-square = 12.936, p < 0.001), the academic major statistic is not significant (chi-square = 1.617, p = 0.203 > 0.05).

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Correspondence to Yung-Lien Lai.

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Lai, YL. College Students’ Satisfaction with Police Services in Taiwan. Asian Criminology 11, 207–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-015-9227-9

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