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Antecedents of Trust in the Jamaican Police: Findings from a Cross-Sectional Study

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Abstract

This study contributes to the extant literature by being the first to examine the relative impacts of instrumental factors of policing (police performance, risk of sanctioning, and distributive justice) and experiences with police (personal and vicarious) on trust in the police in Jamaica. This study’s importance is enhanced by the fact that it was carried out in a region that has been understudied by policing scholars. Using cross-sectional data from a sample of Jamaicans, homeownership predicted trust in the police. In addition, distributive justice, effectiveness, and personal experiences, but not risk of sanctioning and vicarious experiences, predicted Jamaicans’ trust in their country’s police. The implications for policing, policy, and future research are addressed.

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Notes

  1. Trust and obligation to obey were combined as a measure of legitimacy in many studies (for example, see Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler et al., 2010). However, some scholars began to challenge this conceptualization when they observed that trust and obligation to obey loaded onto different scales when items for both constructs were factor analyzed simultaneously (for example, see Gau, 2011; Johnson et al., 2014; Pryce et al., 2017; Tankebe, 2009). As employed by Sunshine and Tyler (2003) and others, legitimacy (trust and obligation to obey) was then used as a mediating variable to predict the relative effects of normative factors of policing (e.g., procedural justice) and instrumental factors of policing (e.g., performance and risk of sanctioning) on certain outcomes, such as satisfaction, compliance, and cooperation with police. This was the “causal” order of perceptions of policing research for a long period. But as scholars began to challenge this “causal” order, research studies began to examine the relative effects of normative and instrumental factors of policing directly on satisfaction, compliance, and cooperation with police, as well as empowerment of police (for example, see Grant & Pryce, 2020; Pryce, 2018, 2019; Pryce & Grant, 2020). Some scholars also began to use obligation to obey as the sole measure of legitimacy (Kochel, 2012; Kochel et al., 2013), whereas others had used trust as the sole measure of legitimacy (Boateng, 2018; Pryce, 2018, 2019). Because legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in so many different ways (for example, see Kochel et al., 2013; Tankebe, 2013), we chose to retain the “sacrosanctity” of the trust variable in the current paper, rather than call it legitimacy, as other scholars had done.

  2. The second author, a Jamaican native, collected the current data in the summer of 2017.

  3. According to Tabachnick and Fidell (2007), a sample with at least 150 cases is ideal for factor analysis, provided that the solutions have several high loading marker variables, which our sample demonstrates (Pallant, 2010). Gorsuch (1983) noted that a sample size of 100 should suffice for factor analysis; we have a sample size of 163 in the current study. Factor loadings were set at 0.40 or higher.

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Acknowledgements

We extend our deepest gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their time and feedback, which helped to strengthen the arguments proffered in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, 23529, USA

    Daniel K. Pryce

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC, 27707, USA

    Lorna E. Grant

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  1. Daniel K. Pryce
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Correspondence to Daniel K. Pryce.

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Pryce, D.K., Grant, L.E. Antecedents of Trust in the Jamaican Police: Findings from a Cross-Sectional Study. Int Criminol 1, 329–340 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43576-021-00036-9

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