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Relationships between Agency-Specific Contact, Victimization Type, and Trust and Confidence in the Police and Courts

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Abstract

While the extant research on trust and confidence in the criminal justice system is broad in scope, its individual studies are more limited, leaving much unknown about these relationships. Building on prior research, the current study investigates the relationships between prior contact, victimization, and seven measures of trust and confidence in the police and courts. This study responds to calls for the relationships between trust and confidence in the criminal justice system, race/ethnicity, prior contact, and victimization to be investigated within a single study. Although rare in prior research, outcomes of trust and confidence in local police and courts are individually investigated within the same sample simultaneously. As a first, the current study also separates prior contact by police, courts, community corrections, and institutional corrections and examines four types of victimization (direct violent, vicarious violent, direct non-violent, vicarious non-violent). The latter allows for an examination of potentially more nuanced relationships between victimization and trust and confidence in the police and in the courts.

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Notes

  1. Generally, compliance can be achieved through coercive power or legitimacy where the public voluntarily abides by the authority’s rules and decisions. Legitimacy is preferred as the former is resource intensive (e.g., surveillance) and difficult to maintain through various periods (e.g. crisis, conflict) (Tyler, 2006).

  2. Process-based regulation holds that the quality of decision-making and treatment experienced shapes judgment, and that judgment then affects whether one deems the entity legitimate, cooperates, and accepts the decision (Tyler, 2003). Many significant works in this arena exist; for example, see Tyler (2003).

  3. Direct contact consists of the respondents themselves having contact with the police, while vicarious contact refers to respondents having heard about others’ contact with the police.

  4. Limited studies do exist; see Tanasichuk and Wormith (2012) and Tyler (2001).

  5. The 1817-respondent sample includes 395 Blacks living in Little Rock (21.74%), 427 Blacks living outside of Little Rock but in Pulaski County (23.50%), 403 Whites living in Little Rock (22.18%), 421 Whites living outside of Little Rock but in Pulaski County (23.17%), and 171 Hispanics living in Pulaski County (includes Little Rock) (9.41%).

  6. Sensitivity analysis was conducted by testing for significant differences across means of the final sample and those not included in the final sample using SAS 9.4’s PROC MI function.

  7. Vicarious victimization occurs when people experience trauma, such as crime, invoked by the victimization of another person or persons (Peterson, 2010).

  8. An indicator measure of whether the respondent resided in the City of Little Rock or elsewhere in Pulaski County was also examined. However, this variable was only available for the Black and White respondents, resulting in the exclusion of the Hispanic respondents from this analysis. In these more limited models, the city/county measure did not reach statistical significance. Therefore, the current study does not employ the city/county indicator but does include the sample of Hispanics, which we find important to the overall study based on prior research.

  9. Four of these six significant direct non-violent victimization effects were either highly significant for decreased odds at p < .001 (Models 10, 14) or p < .01 (Models 8, 11).

  10. Three of these significant reductions were at the p < .01 level (Models 9, 12, 14).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, 1664 N. Virginia St, Ansari Business Building 614, Reno, NV, 89557, USA

    Emily R. Berthelot

  2. Department of Criminology, University of West Georgia, Pafford Social Science Building Room 221, Carrollton, GA, 30118, USA

    Brittani A. McNeal

  3. Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Missouri State University, 901 S. National, Strong Hall Rm. 226, Springfield, MO, 65897, USA

    Julie Marie Baldwin

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  1. Emily R. Berthelot
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  2. Brittani A. McNeal
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Correspondence to Julie Marie Baldwin.

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Berthelot, E.R., McNeal, B.A. & Baldwin, J.M. Relationships between Agency-Specific Contact, Victimization Type, and Trust and Confidence in the Police and Courts. Am J Crim Just 43, 768–791 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9434-x

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