Finds community-oriented policing improves attitudes toward police

Brief, friendly door-to-door visits by uniformed police officers substantially improve people's attitudes toward the police and increase their trust in law enforcement, according to a new study of community-oriented policing in New Haven. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first randomized, controlled field experiment to test the effects of community-oriented policing on people's opinions of their local police. The researchers found that a single, positive, nonenforcement-related encounter enhanced the legitimacy of police officers and increased people's willingness to cooperate with the police. The positive effects of the unannounced door-to-door visits were durable as residents continued to report improved attitudes toward police 21 days after the initial encounters, according to the study, which was conducted in partnership with the New Haven Police Department. The researchers found that the visits were effective across racial and ethnic groups and that the long-term positive effects were strongest among non-white residents and people who held negative views of the police prior to the intervention. " Policy makers promote community-oriented policing as a means to build trust between police officers and the communities they serve, but there has been little evidence on whether the nonenforcement interactions at the heart of community policing actually cause people to view the police differently," said Kyle Peyton , a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University and lead author of the study.