| Abstrakt: |
Citizens' attitudes toward the police have long been of interest to law enforcement as well as researchers. Policing efforts are enhanced if an agency enjoys a positive relationship with its citizenry. Research suggests that this relationship is shaped to some degree by several contextual and individual factors. One of the more powerful correlates is race/ethnicity. Specifically, people of color generally assert more negative attitudes toward the police than do whites. Research in this area, however, generally examines only the views of African Americans, whites and, more recently, Hispanics. This study addresses this gap by exploring the influence of several neighborhood and individual factors on perceptions of the police across four categories of race/ethnicity, African American, Hispanic, Cambodian and white. Data were drawn from a representative sample of residents in a large, western, racially and economically diverse urban center. Multivariate analysis is used to test several hypotheses linking perceptions of law enforcement to neighborhood disorder, victimization, contact with the police, and gender. The influence of cultural history on attitudes toward authority and the implications for crime control policies are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
