A Racial Divide: College Student Attitudes concerning Police in South Louisiana

Past research indicates that legitimacy encourages compliance with the law.This study extends consideration of the influence of legitimacy by exploring its impact on cooperation with the police and with neighbors to combat crime in one's community.It uses a panel study design and focuses upon the residents of New York City.The study finds that legitimacy shapes cooperation with the police and has a lesser influence on cooperation with others in the community.Consistent with the findings of prior...

Introduction. 1. The Master Patterns. 2. Inside the System. 3. Deposits of Power. 4. Stories of Change. 5. The Professionals. 6. Visions of Order. 7. What Is To Be Done. Appendix. Index.

The purpose of this study is to extend our understanding of attitudes toward the police by examining how race/ethnicity, social class, and neighborhood context interact to influence four different dimensions of attitudes: neighborhood, global, police services, and fear of the police. The results showed significant racial/ethnic variation in perceptions of the police, with African-Americans reporting the most negative attitudes. The magnitude of the racial/ethnic gap, however, varied across the d...

Research focusing on citizens' perceptions of police has been widespread at the local level; however, little attention has been devoted to state policing organizations. This focus is particularly interesting considering the enhanced role state police agencies have assumed in recent years. This study analyzes categorical and ordered categorical attitudinal data collected from a statewide sample in the State of Washington. Among the findings reported are significant gender differences and the obse...

What, if any, changes have occurred in the nation’s police departments 21 years after the Rodney King beating? To answer this question, this study examined findings provided by the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP). An additional goal of this study was to examine how the public generally perceive police and how race and racism shape this discourse. To answer this secondary question, we examined narratives provided by 36 contributors to the NPMSRP site. The foll...

This paper explores the influence of people's general attitudes and experiences from contact with police (both citizen-initiated and police-initiated) on public satisfaction with police in Australia. Findings support research from US-based studies about the relationship between dissatisfaction with police encounters and lower public satisfaction with police. Satisfaction from citizen-initiated contact with police was found to explain the largest amount of public satisfaction with police. Three f...

This conceptual article critically examines the relationship between cultural competence, oppressive practices, and micro-aggression within the field of social work and the larger community. The Council on Social Work Education requires that topics of race, power, privilege, and cultural competence be included in the graduate schools of social work it endorses. However, the impact of race, culture, class, and privilege in society and the work environment in the form of micro-aggression remains i...

Public perceptions of policing have provided a good deal of concern in recent years. However, there is also a growing body of evidence that suggests that part of the issue for policing local communities may stem from an ability to communicate effectively with the local populace. This article discusses the role of public perception and identifies a number of key factors implicit to the experience of policing. These include fairness in policing, media representation and the use of new (social) med...

The Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination (BRAVE) Project is a group violence reduction strategy based on the Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire. This violence reduction model is predicated on the idea that violence can be dramatically reduced when community members and law enforcement join together to directly engage with criminal groups. In Baton Rouge, selected law enforcement officers have received specialized training regarding the implementation of the BRAVE Project and additional tr...