Determinants of Public Attitudes Toward the Police

Public perception of law enforcement exerts a clear and meaningful effect on behavior and attitudes. Public perception of systemic racism in law enforcement, for example, motivated widespread public demonstrations and calls for systemic reform in the United States in 2020 following the widely publicized police killing of George Floyd (Buchanan, Bui, and Patel Reference Buchanan, Bui and Patel2020). As Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (Reference Epp, Maynard-Moody and Haider-Markel2014) demonstrate, police stops of black motorists can also raise racial group consciousness, particularly among those who believe police systematically discriminate against black persons. Finally, perceptions of police legitimacy can affect the likelihood that individuals will defer to police authority, cooperate with officers to solve crime, or comply with officers' orders (Tyler and Fagan Reference Tyler and Fagan2008; Tyler and Jackson Reference Tyler and Jackson2014).

Research conducted in several national contexts has uncovered a relatively consistent pattern of demographic differences in attitudes toward the police. The most well-known differences relate to race and ethnicity: while most surveyed individuals report having net positive attitudes toward the police, race and ethnic minority status consistently predict negative attitudes. In the United States, Canada, and the UK, for example, black or Afro-descendent persons report more negative perceptions of police officers than white persons (Bowling, Parmar, and Phillips Reference Bowling, Parmar, Phillips and Newburn2003; Bradford Reference Bradford2011; Brown and Benedict Reference Brown and Benedict2002; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2005; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah Reference Wortley and Owusu-Bempah2009).

Encounter-level factors help explain or mediate some of the relationship between race and attitudes toward the police. Encounter-level factors relate to the nature or quality of the interaction between police officers and the public, such as whether the encounter was initiated by the police officer or the citizen, whether the person received a ticket or was arrested, or whether force was used (Brown and Benedict Reference Brown and Benedict2002). Among encounter-level factors, few matter as much as procedural justice, or the extent to which police officers treat civilians with fairness, politeness, and neutrality (Sunshine and Tyler Reference Sunshine and Tyler2003; Tyler and Huo Reference Tyler and Huo2002). Irrespective of the outcome of an encounter, civilians want to be treated with dignity, competently, and without bias, and are more likely to view the police positively and with legitimacy when they believe that the police behave in this manner (Tyler and Jackson Reference Tyler and Jackson2014).

Observed racial differences in public perceptions toward the police are therefore partly a consequence of the disproportionate number of contacts with the police that black persons experience and the quality of those contacts. In the United States, Canada, and UK, black persons are far more likely to be subject to involuntary police contact and adverse contact (arrest, search, or use of force), controlling for their share of the population, rates of engagement in crime, distribution across neighborhoods, and other relevant factors (Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss Reference Gelman, Fagan and Kiss2007; Ontario Human Rights Commission 2018; Vomfell and Stewart Reference Vomfell and Stewart2021). In each of these countries, research also characterizes the poor quality of police contact with black persons, which can be more arbitrary, unprofessional, disrespectful, and abusive than the contacts that white persons have with the police (Bowling, Parmar, and Phillips Reference Bowling, Parmar, Phillips and Newburn2003; Tyler and Huo Reference Tyler and Huo2002; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah Reference Wortley and Owusu-Bempah2009).

However, these individual and encounter-level factors do not explain all of the variance in attitudes toward the police and do not totally mediate the effect of race on individual perceptions of the police. In other words, disparities in attitudes toward the police cannot totally be explained by the disproportionate contact that individual black persons have with the police or the fact that these contacts are qualitatively worse than those that white people have.

Vicarious contact with the police and depictions of police behavior in media also play an important role. Vicarious contact can affect an individual's attitudes through a variety of mechanisms: individuals can internalize the negative experiences that individuals in their social networks have with the police, may become angered by the treatment that people they care about receive, or learn about the police's function and role through the experiences of others or representation in media Walker (Reference Walker2020). Vicarious contacts can also reverberate or amplify an individual's own negative contact with the police (Rosenbaum et al. Reference Rosenbaum2005).

Individuals with friends or family members who have had contact with the police system tend to report significantly worse perceptions of the police (Rosenbaum et al. Reference Rosenbaum2005; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller Reference Tyler, Fagan and Geller2014; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2005). Weitzer and Tuch (Reference Weitzer and Tuch2004, Reference Weitzer and Tuch2005) show, for example, that vicarious police contact through friends and family members is associated with less overall satisfaction with the police and greater belief that the police are prejudiced and engage in racial profiling. Although vicarious contact through friends and family appears to be the most important, personal evaluation of how police treat members of the community also matters. Tyler, Fagan, and Geller (Reference Tyler, Fagan and Geller2014, 765), for example, show that individual-level perceptions of police legitimacy are powerfully shaped by evaluations of police behavior and procedural justice in their neighborhood, and that general judgments about how the police treat neighbors is almost as important to perceived legitimacy as personal experiences with the police.

Importantly, the negative effects of vicarious police contact on perceptions of the police are concentrated among black Americans. Since police disparately target black Americans for stops, concentrate proactive policing strategies in minority communities, and engage in qualitatively worse policing in those neighborhoods, black Americans are significantly more likely to report that a close family member or friend has been stopped by the police, and to know of or witness police use of force, misconduct, or harassment in their communities (Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss Reference Gelman, Fagan and Kiss2007; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller Reference Tyler, Fagan and Geller2014; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2006).

Black Americans are also more likely to frame the vicarious police contacts of friends, family, and neighbors in systemic terms. In other words, they are more likely to situate the contact that black friends, family, and neighbors have with the police within a framework that sees racial discrimination as endemic in US policing and as a manifestation of deep and pervasive racial inequality that spans a range of social institutions (Soss and Weaver Reference Soss and Weaver2017; Weitzer Reference Weitzer2017). Accordingly, stops of black friends, family members, and neighbors can serve as evidence of systemic anti-black racism or as examples of how they are likely to be treated by the police in potential future interactions. This research helps to explain why some empirical studies find that vicarious interactions are more pronounced or only appear in black Americans (Rosenbaum et al. Reference Rosenbaum2005; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2004; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2005).

Media coverage of police behavior can also powerfully shape attitudes and perceptions of the police, and for similar reasons. While research demonstrates that media generally affects the world view of those who consume it (Gerbner Reference Gerbner1998), individuals viewing news of the police may internalize the experiences of others, become angered by the treatment of others, or learn about the police's function. Weitzer (Reference Weitzer2002), for example, show that newspaper and television coverage of police brutality against Rodney King and others by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) led to dramatic declines in trust and confidence lasting months or years. Consumption of news about police violence on the Internet, including through social media, can also lead to negative attitudes about the police (Gauthier and Graziano Reference Gauthier and Graziano2018; Intravia, Wolff, and Piquero Reference Intravia, Wolff and Piquero2018).

As with personal vicarious interactions, the negative effect of news coverage of policing is also concentrated among minority racial and ethnic groups (Graziano, Schuck, and Martin Reference Graziano, Schuck and Martin2010; Weitzer and Tuch Reference Weitzer and Tuch2004). This is likely attributable (at least in part) to the combination of racial disparities in police misconduct and violence against black Americans, and the greater affinity that black viewers of these stories have with the victims: black Americans viewing a preponderance of news stories in which they share similar demographic characteristics with victims of police violence and misconduct may fear becoming victims of police misconduct or violence themselves, or come to hold negative views of the police (Chiricos, Eschholz, and Gertz Reference Chiricos, Eschholz and Gertz1997). As with personal and vicarious interactions with the police, it is also likely that black Americans understand these news stories in systemic terms—as a consequence of severe and continued racial inequality—and as relevant to experiences they (or people they care about) may have with police officers in the future.

Transnational Consequences of Police Misconduct on Attitudes Toward the Police

This research helps frame the consequences that the high-profile police killings of unarmed black Americans has had on American attitudes toward the police (Taylor Reference Taylor2016). Starting first with Eric Garner's killing on July 17, 2014, and continuing with the police killings of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, Ezell Ford on August 11, 2014, and many others since then, these incidents of police violence have had a sharp and deleterious effect on expressed satisfaction with police officers and perceptions of racial bias (Ekins Reference Ekins2016; Kochel Reference Kochel2019; Menasce Horowitz and Livingston Reference Menasce Horowitz and Livingston2017). As several surveys have demonstrated since then, however, the effects have been highly racialized, exerting a far stronger effect on black American attitudes toward the police than white American attitudes toward the police.

Yet, while the effect of these incidents in the United States is relatively well appreciated, little attention has been paid to the effect they can have elsewhere. I argue, however, that high-profile incidents of police violence in the United States have the potential to affect attitudes of Afro-descendent people in other national contexts for several, interconnected reasons.

First, past research on the black diaspora demonstrates that Afro-descendent persons across national contexts continue to maintain a shared cultural affinity and attachment to one another, such that black individuals in one national context identify with the experiences of black individuals in another (Edwards Reference Edwards2009; Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Narayan Reference Narayan2019; Patterson and Kelley Reference Patterson and Kelley2000). Research in this literature argues that the identities of Afro-descendent persons are not totally circumscribed by national community and that, at various points in time and to varying degrees, black intellectuals, political activists, and everyday citizens have viewed themselves as members of a larger international black community (Patterson and Kelley Reference Patterson and Kelley2000). Accordingly, black persons outside of the United States may identify with victims of police violence in the United States, and their attitudes toward the police may shift accordingly.

Some of this shared identity or cultural affinity has been characterized in survey research. Sizable and comparable portions of both the black American and black British population, for example, identify primarily as “black” rather than as a citizen of their country (British or American) (Laniyonu Reference Laniyonu2019). Surveys conducted in the United States similarly suggest that native-born black Americans express a sense of diasporic linked fate, or a sense that the fates of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the United States have some bearing on what happens to them in their lives (Nunnally Reference Nunnally2010).

Second, black residents in many North American and European countries experience persistent discrimination, structural disadvantage, and mistreatment by the police. Vomfell and Stewart (Reference Vomfell and Stewart2021), for example, find that police officers in the UK are significantly more likely to stop and search black residents, even after controlling for the racial and ethnic composition of criminal suspects and neighborhoods. They demonstrate that this disparity in searches may be attributed both to individual-level bias among officers and to systemic racism, such as the over-patrolling of minority neighborhoods. As a consequence, black Britons are likely to have had negative contact with the police, to hold negative attitudes toward the police, and to believe that policing is systemically biased against black residents (Bowling, Parmar, and Phillips Reference Bowling, Parmar, Phillips and Newburn2003; Bradford, Jackson, and Stanko Reference Bradford, Jackson and Stanko2009). Given evidence that the negative effects of vicarious interactions with the police are stronger among individuals who have had frequent or poor interactions with the police themselves (Rosenbaum et al. Reference Rosenbaum2005), high-profile incidents of police violence and misconduct in the United States may therefore be more likely to affect black residents in other contexts specifically.

Finally, black residents in other national contexts may understand or frame police violence in the United States against black Americans as rooted in anti-black racism and shared marginalization that black citizens experience across many national contexts. Many black Americans understand and frame the police's role in political terms, and see the police as an institution that not only discriminates against them, but also actively maintains group-based inequality through violence, surveillance, and coercion (Soss and Weaver Reference Soss and Weaver2017; Weitzer Reference Weitzer2017). Critical for the present study, however, is research which demonstrates that moments of state violence against black people in one context—for example, by local police in the United States against non-violent protesters during the Civil Rights Movement or in South Africa in Sharpsville and Soweto—can galvanize and affect black people's attitudes and behavior in another (Waters Reference Waters2013; Williams Reference Williams2015).

At the same time, there are important differences in the experiences and attitudes of black persons across national contexts, and the strength of collective identification may not be as strong as suggested by diaspora studies. In a study on the effect of the BLM movement in Vancouver, Canada, for example, police officers suggested that police–community relations in Vancouver were significantly superior to those in the United States and that they did not believe that police killings in the United States exerted much, if any, effect on how local residents viewed the police (Sandhu Reference Sandhu2018). Empirical research in the UK also suggests that there are potential limits to the extent to which black Britons may identify with the experiences that black Americans have with the police, owing, in part, to ethnic and migratory differences among black Britons. Bradford (Reference Bradford2011), for example, demonstrates that while Afro-Caribbean Britons have worse attitudes toward the police compared to white Britons, African Britons have, on average, better attitudes toward the police than have both white and Afro-Caribbean Britons.

There are other reasons to doubt that police violence in the United States might affect attitudes toward the police in other contexts. In general, while black residents of such countries as Canada and the UK are disproportionately more likely to come into contact with the police and experience harm at the hands of the police relative to white residents, the per capita rate of the most severe forms of police contact are much higher in absolute terms for black Americans. The rate of fatal police shootings of black persons, for example, is several times higher in the United States than it is in Canada or the UK (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito Reference Edwards, Lee and Esposito2019; Independent Office for Police Conduct 2018; Marcoux and Nicholson Reference Marcoux and Nicholson2018).

Further, while black intellectuals and political activists were animated in much of the 20th century by conceptions that the political fate of black peoples is globally linked (for example, Pan-Africanism), it is not clear to what extent this affects attitudes and behavior today, particularly among the general public and in the “Global North.” For example, while Paschel (Reference Paschel2016) characterizes the importance that an international network of black intellectuals, activists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had in effecting the implementation of land reforms and affirmative action policies that aided Afro-Columbians and Afro-Brazilians, respectively, their study suggests that such influence is limited to countries in the “Global South.” Further, their work suggests that this sort of influence works principally on social elites, rather than everyday people.

The Current Study

On the whole, the extant literature suggests that high-profile incidents of police violence against black Americans can significantly erode their trust and confidence in the police. I argue, however, that the negative effects of vicarious police contact and portrayals of police violence in the media on black attitudes toward the police are not limited to black persons in the United States. In the current study, I mobilize data on the potential effect that police killings in the United States have on Londoners' attitudes toward their local police and hypothesize that:

Extant research suggests that trust and confidence in the police is composed of multiple components, including general satisfaction, perceptions of fairness, perceptions of community engagement, and perceptions of efficacy at solving crime (Jackson and Bradford Reference Jackson and Bradford2010). Public opinion, however, tends to be driven by general affect and impressions, so events that erode attitudes toward the police in general might affect all of these components. Empirical literature on public satisfaction with the police, however, suggests that major events do not move these components uniformly in direction or magnitude (Hohl, Stanko, and Newburn Reference Hohl, Stanko and Newburn2013). Thus, while overall satisfaction with the police and perceptions of fairness may be sensitive to police killings abroad, black Londoners' perceptions of police efficacy at solving crime or engaging with the community may not necessarily be affected, as violence against black persons may not clearly be connected to police performance in these domains. I therefore hypothesize that:

Analytic Strategy

I estimate the causal effect that police violence in the United States may have had on attitudes toward the police in London using an RDD or UESD, which can recover plausibly causal effects when experiments are unfeasible or undesirable (Jacob et al. Reference Jacob2012; Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno, and Hernández Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández2020). Studies of the political effects of police violence or misconduct may suffer from well-known issues of omitted variable bias, where some unmeasured factor determines both the chances than an individual receives some “treatment” and the outcome of interest. In this application, individuals in London may not be randomly exposed to images or news of police violence in the United States, and if such exposure is correlated with attitudes toward the police, then estimates of the effect of exposure to attitudes—such as those that might be generated from a cross-sectional survey—will be biased. Although some studies have randomized exposure to fictionalized police contact or violence in lab settings, and have usefully explored the emotional mechanisms through which this contact can affect some outcomes of interest (see, for example, Smith, Lopez, and Krishnamurthy Reference Smith, Lopez and Krishnamurthy2018), randomly exposing individuals to real-world instances of police violence is both impossible and unethical. Further, exposure done in a controlled lab setting may not approximate real-word exposure.

The identification strategy used here approximates as-if random exposure to police violence by comparing attitudes toward the police among respondents who were interviewed for a local survey in a narrow window before the killing of Eric Garner with those interviewed in a narrow window after it. This identification strategy assumes that who was interviewed and when they were interviewed for the survey are uncorrelated with attitudes toward the police, a highly plausible assumption given the sampling methodology used in the dataset used here (described in more detail later). In short, since interviewees were selected at random among residents of city and the timing of the interview was determined randomly, the date of the interview can be used to estimate the causal effect of police violence in the United States on attitudes in the UK.

I therefore estimate the effect that the killing of Eric Garner in the United States had on attitudes toward the police in an RDD where the date of interview defines the score, the date when Eric Garner was killed—on July 17, 2014—defines the cutoff, and units are said to be treated if they were interviewed after Eric Garner's death. I estimate the local average treatment effect of Garner's killing using the method of local linear approximation described in Cattaneo, Idrobo, and Titiunik (Reference Cattaneo, Idrobo and Titiunik2019), which fits a local linear regression to subjects interviewed before and after Garner's killing separately within a narrow window or bandwidth of the cutoff. Bandwidths used and presented in the analysis are mean-squared error (MSE) optimal bandwidths, also described in Cattaneo, Idrobo, and Titiunik (Reference Cattaneo, Idrobo and Titiunik2019).Footnote ¹

A key assumption needed to interpret the results of the analysis as the causal effect of police killings in the United States on black British attitudes is that no other factor that could affect local attitudes toward the police changed systematically at the cut point (Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno, and Hernández Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández2020). I conducted a qualitative review of several major British newspaper issues published in the immediate aftermath of Garner's death and did not uncover the occurrence of major changes to police policy, criminal events, or local instances of misconduct or brutality that might otherwise explain the result. Interpretation also relies on the assumption that assignment to treatment and control conditions is independent of potential outcomes, the plausibility of which I test in several analyses later.

Data

To test these hypotheses, I mobilize data from the MPPAS. The MPPAS is a face-to-face survey that has been conducted annually since 1983 and has been in its current from—with the same target sample size of 12,8000 interviews—since 2011. The survey is a rolling survey and has been in the field continuously since 2011. It aims to provide local police and government with representative data on local attitudes toward the police.

The sampling frame used for the study is a list of residential addresses drawn from the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File, a database that contains all known delivery points and postcodes. This list of residential addresses was stratified by borough, and then, using a random starting point in the list, a one in n selection was made to randomly select addresses to be included in the sample. Addresses were randomly assigned months to be interviewed at the beginning of the survey period with equal probability using a similar one in n method. Each month and for each borough, approximately three times the number of addresses required were in circulation. Those addresses that were still valid (for example, those who had not refused to participate and those who had not been interviewed) at the end of one month were carried forward into the following month. Selected households were not recontacted if they refused to participate, and surveyors attempted to contact households three times before removing them from the list. Interviews could only be conducted with the addresses issued to the interviewers; interviewers could not replace any addresses by going next door or across the road, for example. At each household, respondents were selected randomly by identifying the person whose next birthday was closest to the date of the interviewer's visit.

Future Research

The policy implications of these findings are not entirely clear. Results clearly demonstrate that efforts by the Metropolitan Police to improve black Londoners' attitudes toward the police are affected by events beyond their control. Given the limited nature of the data, however, it is not possible to assess the extent to which these killings affected attitudes toward social or political policies more broadly. Given the documented influence that black political activists have had on black social movements and civil rights policies in Canada, the UK, and Brazil, tracing the impact that events in the United States have on policy preferences and political behaviors elsewhere constitutes an important site for future research.

This study is also unable to conclusively demonstrate that survey respondents were aware of the killings or consumed media concerning it. Black Londoners, for a variety of reasons, may have had greater exposure to the killings than white and South Asian Londoners. It may be that if all Londoners were equally exposed to news of the killings, we would have observed a similar treatment effect across groups. If, however, black Londoners purposefully sought out or were differentially more likely to be exposed to news on the killings because of their race, then the underling mechanism through which police killings in the US affects attitudes elsewhere may work through differential embeddedness in (transnational/diasporic) news or social media networks. This might be the case: survey data from the Office of Communications suggests that in 2014, minority racial and ethnic Britons: were less likely to read the news, listen to the radio, or read newspapers relative to white Britons; were no more likely to use social medial than white Britons; and generally turn to the same social medial websites for news. This is not definitive: the lumping together of all minority ethnic groups may mask differences and does not allow us to understand Londoners specifically. Generally, however, understanding the extent to which black persons outside the United States consume media on black American politics and culture, and how this affects their social and political attitudes, also constitute rich sites for future research.

The survey also does not allow the identification of potential differences in the effects that news coverage of the killings, circulation of images/video (on social or traditional media), and black American demonstrations against police violence had on attitudes. Since, however, police killings of black Americans precipitate all three, the analysis conducted here is representative of real-world events (see also Enos, Kaufman, and Sands Reference Enos, Kaufman and Sands2019). Nevertheless, differentiating between the effects that each can have on attitudes is important. Future work may consider addressing this as well.

Finally, while Garner's death was the first filmed and widely circulated police killing during the BLM movement, there have been many since. The analysis presented here is of a single, though important, case; the extent to which the findings generalize to other cases remains unknown. Future work may do well to consider how characteristics of the victim (such as gender) mediate the effect or changes in the effect over time. Future work may also do well to consider other diasporic or transnational communities or ethnic groups.