Graeme Blair: Crime, insecurity, and community policing – Experiments on building trust

Moynihan Institute’s program for the Study of Global Politics welcomes Graeme Blair from UCLA.

Is it possible to reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between police and citizens? Community policing is a celebrated reform with that aim, now adopted on every continent. Yet, the evidence base is limited, studying reform components in isolation in a limited set of countries, and largely silent on citizen-police trust.

We designed six field experiments with Global South police agencies to study locally designed models of community policing, with coordinated measures of crime and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens and police. In a preregistered meta-analysis, we find that these interventions led to mixed implementation, largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and do not reduce crime. Structural changes may be required for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed.

Blair is an associate professor of political science. He serves as the co-director of methods and trainings at Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).