Trust in police: A comparison of China and Taiwan

Public Trust in Nigerian Police: A Test of Police Accessibility Effects

“…This is so because, the way the public conceptualizes and evaluates their police can determine the way they respond, the support they render, and the trust they have in the police (Wua, Poteyeva, & Sun 2012). The effectiveness of police organization can be measured by the level of confidence and trust the public has in such police organization (Jackson et al, 2011).…”

A Review of Taiwanese Trust in the Police with Alternative Interpretations

“…When citizens accept the legitimacy of the police, they are more likely to comply with the law and follow officers' commands (Tyler, 1990). The police enforce laws and carry out strategies of crime control, which have direct impacts on citizens' chance of victimization, quality of life, and perceptions of personal safety in the immediate environments (Sun et al, 2012). Thus, criminal victimization experience tends to make citizens believe that the police is incompetent to protect them.…”

“…Studies conducted in the American and European societies focus on social construct of trust in police with multiple dimensions (Hawdon, 2008;Jackson et al, 2011;Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). Some prior studies measuring trust in the police in Taiwan suffer from single question item regarding trust that somewhat leans toward psychological aspect (Wu, 2014;Wu et al, 2012) and deviate from the very nature of the police as a social institution and trust in the police is a social construct. Simply asking "do you trust the police?"…”

“…While the market of mass media has been opened for competition, the police retain its radio station and professional magazines. However, the police are not waived from being the subjects to media coverage of misconducts or scandals (Cao et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2012). Today's Taiwanese perceptions of the police are significantly influenced by the media -citizens who know negative media coverage about the police and believe in negative news of the police tend to have a lower level of trust in police Wang & Sun, 2018).…”

“…First, Taiwan is an island society that has experimented political transformation and successfully switched from authoritarianism to democracy (Cao et al, 2014), and such a case offers implications to other Chinese societies that either face enormous societal and economic changes (e.g., China) or political transitions (e.g., Hong Kong and Macau). Second, while recent studies have assessed public trust in the police in Taiwan Wu, 2014;Wu et al, 2012) or other Chinese societies (Wu & Sun, 2009;Wu et al, 2012), they often measured the level of police trustworthiness using a singular dummy or ordinal variable. In addition, only one recent empirical study on the Taiwan police addresses rural and urban difference (Wang & Sun, 2018), but, like many prior studies, the interpretation is lacking sufficient social-historical context, which is elaborated in this review.…”