In this chapter, we test the effects of community policing in the Sorsogon Province of the Philippines. The intervention generated a four-fold increase in police-citizen interactions in treated villages, but consistent with meta-analysis of all six sites in this volume, we found no effects of the intervention on crime rates or citizens’ attitudes about public safety. To disaggregate the effects of different aspects of community policing, we sequenced the implementation of community engagement (CEP) and problem-oriented policing (POP) but found no effects on the harmonized outcomes of either CEP on its own or the combination of CEP and POP. Finally, we present suggestive evidence of positive impacts on the specific types of crimes that barangays’ problem-oriented policing teams elected to focus on, indicating that while community policing cannot address all of a community’s problems en masse, it may improve specifically targeted issues.

In this chapter, we test the efficacy of community policing in thirteen districts throughout rural Uganda. As in many authoritarian regimes, police in Uganda serve the dual role of providing security to citizens on the one hand and quelling dissent and opposition on behalf of the regime on the other. Community policing may help citizens delink the political arm of the police from less politicized local officers. The community policing initiative we study was locally designed and funded by the Ugandan police. Our evaluation combines administrative crime data from the Uganda Police Force with surveys of thousands of Ugandan citizens, local leaders, and police officers. While the initiative we study succeeded in increasing the frequency of interactions between citizens and the police in these far-flung villages and improved citizens’ understanding of the criminal justice system, we find no evidence that it reduced crime, enhanced perceptions of safety, improved attitudes towards the police, or strengthened norms of cooperation with the police. These results are consistent with other chapters in this volume and point to the potential limitations of community policing in low-income countries.

Between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, citizen security in Medellín dramatically improved and police violence declined. But residents’ trust in police stagnated. We evaluate a police-led effort to build trust through town-hall-style police–community meetings. In 174 treated neighborhoods – but not in 173 control neighborhoods – the police held more than 500 such meetings over a period of nine months. We find that the meetings induced small positive changes in perceptions of the police, though they did not alter trust in police per se – or crime reporting behavior, much less crime itself. We interpret these findings as evidence that voluntary informal contact between residents and police officers is a weak but not irrelevant policy for reshaping police–community relations.

This chapter lays out the theoretical foundations of community policing and highlights evidence gaps in evaluations of community policing’s effectiveness. Community policing is a law enforcement strategy that centers around building trust between police and citizens as well as promoting citizen engagement with authorities in order to advance public safety. The chapter describes the origins of community policing as well as the logic of how it might render the police more effective, primarily through improved information provision from citizens. Despite substantial support for community policing, a systematic review detailed in the chapter reveals significant evidence gaps in evaluations of the effectiveness of community policing interventions such as beat patrols and the police engaging in town hall meetings. The review finds that the evidence gaps are particularly acute with respect to evaluations in Global South communities.

This chapter discusses how to interpret the findings from six randomized experiments on community policing, and the implications for policymaking and police reform. The bottom line is that locally appropriate increases in the strength of community policing practices do not generate the changes to trust in the police, citizen cooperation, or crime reduction that we hypothesized or that its advocates claim. The evidence suggests, at a minimum, that caution should be exercised in advocating for the adoption or continuation of community policing in the Global South. New evidence may emerge that shows community policing can be effective in a different type of context, when implemented in response to demands from a social movement of citizen groups, with a different set of institutional preconditions, or in combination with other reforms, such as citizen accountability boards. Until it does, we suggest that it be deprioritized in the list of policy levers to reduce crime and build trust in police in the Global South.

What is the effect of community policing in settings where the rule of law is weak and communities gripped by crime turn to vigilantism to deter and prevent crime? In this chapter, I test the effectiveness of the Liberia National Police’s model of community policing, which focuses not only on building citizens’ trust and cooperation but also on providing communities with an alternative to vigilantism via its Community Watch Forum initiative. Drawing on large-scale crime surveys and administrative data, I find that the program led to moderate improvements in perceptions of police intentions, norms of cooperation, and perceptions of police capacity. I also find that the program increased community contributions to local security groups, reduced support for mob violence, and reduced reports of actual mob violence incidents by 39 percent. Despite these improvements, the program had no significant effect on other forms of crime victimization, crime reporting, crime tips, or residents’ sense of security.

This chapter studies the effect of Rede de Vizinhos (RdV or “Neighbor Network”) community policing program in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which aims to improve public safety and trust between citizens and police by facilitating real-time information about crime and public safety through dedicated WhatsApp instant messages groups with the participation of a police officer. We randomly allocated neighborhoods that would see the policy implemented into treatment and control groups, with the former being exposed to an information campaign through which we publicized induction meetings using Facebook. Despite reaching roughly 10 percent of Santa Catarina’s population, our study does not find a differential participation rate in the RdV campaign regions. Further, we don’t find evidence of increased perceptions over the police or improvements over criminal rates in treated neighborhoods. Our results suggest that despite their promise, (technology-enabled) community policing programs may fail to deliver substantial impacts given saturation dynamics and diminishing marginal returns – our baseline surveys indicated that 52 percent of respondents had heard already about the RdV program with 13.1 percent actively participating.

What is the effect of community policing in settings where trust in the police is low and local legal institutions make witness cooperation unusually critical for certain kinds of offenses? We study the effect of a citizen-centric problem-oriented policing (CPOP) intervention introduced in March 2019 in Punjab’s Sheikhupura Region, a mixed urban-rural region of 4.9M people. Treatment roll-out in Pakistan was significantly hampered by frequent transfers of the regional and district police officers, reflecting the challenges of implementing institutional reforms in settings where the police face frequent personnel changes. Despite these challenges, the intervention, which included regular town hall meetings at which citizens could share their concerns, led to significant increases in overall perceptions about the police and in citizen beliefs that police have good intentions with respect to addressing crime. Despite the favorable institutional environment for increased trust to lead to crime reduction, we find no evidence of downstream impacts of the program on self-reported crime victimization or crime reported to the police. Observational evidence from follow-up visits suggests that this was because of resource and institutional challenges that limited community police officers’ agency and prevented them from responding to community concerns.

This chapter introduces the concept of community policing and provides a brief history of the practice and its spread. The chapter then identifies a significant gap in rigorous evidence of its efficacy, especially as the practice has been adopted by police agencies in the Global South and describes the core enterprise of the research agenda: a set of coordinated, randomized-control trials evaluating the impact of community policing in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The chapter concludes with a summary of the findings and a discussion of broader implications for the study of policing.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter presents the results of a survey experiment testing cooperation interventions in Lagos. It provides background information on the relatively limited efforts to date to promote police–citizen cooperation in the megacity. The chapter describes the virtual reality–based survey experiment used to test the interventions in which respondents are shown a hypothetical area boy fight from a shopkeeper’s point of view. The results indicate that respondents who viewed the vignettes with an anonymous tip line and the intervention to raise awareness of cooperation support among shopkeepers boosts information sharing. Exposure to co-ethnic police officers in the vignette, however, shows little effect on information sharing. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms through which cooperation support exists despite widespread distrust of the Nigeria Police Force among Lagosians.

This chapter presents the results of a survey experiment testing cooperation interventions in Baltimore. It describes existing efforts in the city to promote cooperation with the police and how police rely on information from witnesses. The survey experiment entails respondents viewing and responding to a professionally produced fictional news report of a shooting with experimental variations to test the various interventions. The results show police encouraging cooperators to call an anonymous tip line (as opposed to a non-anonymous line) as well as creating awareness of cooperation norms both increase information sharing. The police commander portrayed in the news report being the same race as the respondent does not change the amount information that they are willing to share. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms of how support for cooperation exists in Baltimore despite distrust of the police.

This chapter theorizes how interventions employed by police and community safety advocates might promote cooperation. The evaluation focuses on two interventions that plausibly reverse cycles of silence: facilitating cooperator anonymity to reduce the risk involved in information sharing and creating awareness of support for cooperation to strengthen the perceived norms favoring information sharing. Given that these interventions do not address distrust in the police, which places a ceiling on cooperation support, the evaluation also includes the trust-based intervention of exposing citizens to police officers of the same race or ethnicity. The chapter concludes with enumerating principles that should be considered when evaluating the appropriateness of implementing interventions to promote cooperation.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

This chapter critically examines the history of Singapore’s policing system, and argues that while Singapore may be seen as an authoritarian state, its system of policing – save for the existence of preventive detention laws – is largely democratic. During the colonial period, the police force was always short of money and policemen poorly paid, inept, and corrupt. Notwithstanding various reforms, the colonial police were unable to deal with the secret societies – the biggest threat to public order and safety – and relied on a mix of welfare, cooperation, and selective coercion. It was only after Singapore’s independence that local politicians introduced draconian preventive detention laws that succeeded in breaking the backs of the secret societies. Even so, the state did not rely only on these laws to police the population but also invested heavily in strengthening and boosting the police force, reforming it towards a more community-oriented form of policing.

Post-2011, in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, the promotion of community policing has received notable support from Jordan’s Western allies, and a successful initiative piloted in refugee camps to improve liaison between the police and residents was subsequently expanded to the wider host community. But community policing is an amorphous concept that has varied interpretations in different societies depending on the nature of the prevailing social order. This chapter explores some of the shifting understandings of community policing within the Public Security Directorate, which blend perceptions of Jordan’s tribal identity, with its reputation for low crime rates and a small population, and the notion of civic duty within an increasingly neoliberal society. The latter idea of civic duty, which in what is ultimately an illiberal authoritarian context, restricts the degree to which genuine police–public partnerships are possible in Jordan.

Changes aimed at limiting unnecessary contacts come in many forms, including deterring racist 911 abuse in the first place and punishing it when it occurs, increasing dispatcher and police discretion to ignore frivolous 911 calls, mandating alternative, non-police responses to quasi-emergency situations for which an armed officer is not necessary or helpful, and rethinking how police respond when they are required to react. Many of these proposals derive from the same basic premise: that a fundamental reallocation of police resources is both required and desirable if society is to prevent the continued weaponization of racial fear and the continued abuse of law enforcement by private actors.