How Citizens Meet the State: Police Contact, Trust, and Civic Engagement

This paper investigates the relationship between the police, the most visible street-level bureaucrat of local city governments, and citizen political attitudes and behaviors toward local city institutions. We introduce a holistic conceptualization of police-citizen contact and examine how each type impacts citizen trust toward and participation in political institutions. Leveraging an original survey targeting the city of South Bend and spatial data from the city government, results demonstrate that greater day-to-day contact with police has a positive impact on trust in state agencies while citizens who seek service from the police but are left unsatisfied result in lower trust in state apparatus. Most importantly, indirect exposure to police coercion has a negative impact on trust while direct and proximal contact with police predicts higher level of civic activism. This study demonstrates the fragility and challenge of building trust in police-citizen relationships, and how extreme encounters with the police can, in the right circumstances, spur citizen activism.