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Since the mid-1960s there has been a great deal of interest around the world in the use of sample surveys of the general population to study crime. The advantages of doing so have been discussed in detail many times (National Research Council, 1976; Biderman, 1967). Crime surveys have been conducted in many nations, a practice that is continuing despite their heavy cost. Large-scale national surveys have been conducted in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, Great Britain, and Sweden. Smaller but regular national studies have been carried out in the rest of Scandinavia, and there has been a national survey in Spain. There have been large surveys of victimization in individual cities in Germany, Switzerland, and England. Statistics Canada has completed very large studies of seven major cities, including two surveys of Vancouver, and the Israeli Census Bureau has added victimization questions to a national survey. In addition, small but useful city studies have been conducted in Mexico, Colombia, Israel, and Belgium. The four islands that make up the Dutch Antilles also have been surveyed. The findings of these surveys have accumulated to the point where it is possible to perceive cross-national regularities—or clear inconsistencies—in what they reveal.

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This article examines the character and consequences of encounters between Keywords: satisfaction; citizen; contact; raceThis article examines the character and consequences of encounters between police and residents of the city of Chicago. Although there are many determinants of people's attitudes and assessments of policing, none is more important for policy than the quality of service being rendered. Through their training and supervision practices, departments have the capacity to shape the relationship between residents and officers working the street. Whether police are polite or abrasive, concerned or aloof, or helpful or unresponsive to the obvious needs of the people they encounter depends importantly on actions taken by department leaders.

This article examines the relationship between confidence in the police and concern about crime. a large body of research on opinions about police treats confidence in the police as a dependent variable that is influenced by assessments of neighborhood conditions. These studies argue that people hold police accountable for local crime, disorder, and fear. another large body of literature on public perceptions of crime treats concern about crime as a dependent variable that is influenced by confidence in the police. This research stresses the reassurance effects of policing. Taken as a whole, these studies thus assume contradictory causal orderings of these two correlated factors. It is also possible that the relationship between the two is instead reciprocal, with confidence and concern affecting each other, but this possibility has never been tested. This article addresses this central theoretical ambiguity in research on public perceptions, using panel data and structural modeling to identify the most plausible causal ordering of concern about crime and confidence in police. The findings support the reassurance model: reductions in concern about crime flow from increasing confidence in the police, while an accountability link from concern about crime to confidence in the police was much weaker and not statistically significant.