Attitudes toward the police: a critique and recommendations

Abstract

A substantial body of research has examined citizens' attitudes toward the police (ATP). For the most part, this research is rarely guided by theory of attitudes. ATP research tends to assume that research on citizens' views of the police present a portrait of police practices, failing to recognize that attitudinal research is fundamentally reflexive -it tells researchers primarily about the person with the attitudes. The current paper reviews seven theoretical perspectives on ATP, describes their central elements, discusses the way in which they are used in police research, identifies their limitations, and assesses their implications for police policy. It concludes with a discussion of central problems and recommendations for future directions for ATP research.

Stop, Question, and Frisk in New York City: A Study of Public Opinions

“…(Leiber, Nalla, & Farnworth, 1998), and minorities expressed more negative attitudes toward stop-and-frisk compared with White respondents (Taylor, Turner, Esbensen, & Winfree, 2001). The following factors increased the favorability toward at least one aspect related to the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk or support of it, and many of these variables showed similar effects on attitudes toward police in previous studies: higher education level (Wortley, Hagan, & Macmillan, 1997), full-time employment, higher income (Scaglion & Condon, 1980), being married (Parker, Onyekwuluje, & Murty, 1995), having children, personally knowing a police officer (Liu & Crank, 2010), having never been frisked by a police officer, not personally knowing someone who had been stopped or frisked, and having more knowledge of stop-and-frisk. Surprisingly, there were no significant differences between males and females in terms of their attitudes toward stop-and-frisk.…”

Proactive policing and equal treatment of ethnic-minority youths

“…It may well be that the difference in evaluation has little to do with differences in police behaviour. Instead, the difference in evaluation may be a result of different norms, values, expectations and attitudes between ethnic groups (Weitzer and Tuch 1999, Skogan 2006, 2007, Liu and Crank 2010. Furthermore, even if researchers avoid the pitfall of subjective judgement and turn to more objective measurements of outcome inequality, serious problems remain.…”

Racial Resentment and Attitudes Toward the Use of Force by Police: An Over‐Time Trend Analysis

“…In part because of the nation's democratic foundations, public opinion on the police in the United States has received a great deal of scholarly interest (Cao, Frank, and Cullen ; Cao, Stack, and Sun ; Liu and Crank ). In general, this research has found a strong and consistent relationship between attitudes toward the police and race (Halim and Stiles ; Skolnick ; Stiles and Halim ; Thompson and Lee ; Weisburd et al.…”