Public Vulnerability to the Police: A Quantitative Inquiry

Abstract

The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these evaluations vary systematically (using confidence intervals), whether they covary with police legitimacy (using structural equation modeling), and the extent to which that covariance differs by demographic status (using multiple groups structural equation modeling). Our results suggest that black and Muslim individuals evaluate police-caused harm differently than do majority group members (white and Christian) on most, but not all, of the measured dimensions. We also find that those evaluations are predictive of trust and provide evidence of some level of consistency across communities.

Vulnerability: The active ingredient of trust in public governance

“…Thus, crime poses an imposed vulnerability but one that, by virtue of their mandate, becomes a relational vulnerability to the external harms that police agencies are designed to address. In service of addressing this focal vulnerability, the police are then empowered with the ability to legally inflict harm, thereby creating a new internal element (Hamm et al, 2021). As with public health, relatively little research exists that explores the causal impact of felt vulnerability to this external harm on the acceptance of vulnerability to internal harm, but this presumptive tradeoff is foundational to most law enforcement efforts.…”

“…As in other contexts (Sujan et al, 2016), the greatest benefit of policing tends to be experienced by the most enfranchised constituents (Rigakos & Hayden, 2001). As a result, in some disenfranchised communities, the most saliently felt vulnerability arises primarily from the threat of harm caused by the police and especially to those that evolved as a side-effect of long-term risk management practices like stop-and-frisk, the criminalization of low-level offenses, and reliance on cash bail systems (Hamm et al, 2021;Pickett et al, 2021). Arguments in support of the defund and abolition movements demonstrate this clearly as advocates explicitly refuse to accept vulnerability to internal harm posed by the actions of law enforcement (Akbar, 2020;Fleetwood & Lea, 2021).…”

Integrating Focal Vulnerability into Trust Research

“…Previous work using approaches like the Psychometric Paradigm could offer promising alternative dimensions that could be assessed to understand their distinctiveness (e.g., Benthin et al, 1993). What may be even more instructive, however, is a test of their relative impact on trust itself (e.g., Hamm et al, 2022). The primary impact of felt vulnerability should be that, ceteris paribus, increases will result in decreases in trust, and research elucidating the functional dimensions of hazards, risk, and risk perception does provide reason to believe that these kinds of emotional reactions will be most predictive (e.g., Wilson et al, 2019).…”