Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust

How can societies effectively reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between the police and citizens? In recent decades, perhaps the most celebrated innovation in police reform has been the introduction of community policing, where citizens are involved in building channels of dialogue and improving police-citizen collaboration. Despite the widespread adoption of community policing in the United States and increasingly in the developing world, there is still limited credible evidence about whether it realistically increases trust in the police or reduces crime. Through simultaneously coordinated field experiments in a diversity of political contexts, this book presents the outcome of a major research initiative into the efficacy of community policing. Scholars from around the world uncover whether, and under what conditions, this highly influential strategy for tackling crime and insecurity is effective. With its highly innovative approach to cumulative learning, this project represents a new frontier in the study of police reform.

Graeme Blair is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA and Co-Director of Training and Methods of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He uses experiments, field research, and statistics to study how to reduce violence and improve social science research.

Fotini Christia is the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences at MIT and Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. She is the author of Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and her research has appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science.

Jeremy M. Weinstein is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Faculty Director of Stanford Impact Labs. He is an award-winning author and teacher with expertise in comparative politics and the political economy of development. He has also served at senior levels of the US Government, including most recently as Deputy to the US Ambassador to the United Nations.