Trust, Policing and Public Safety
In this episode, our guest, Joe Hamm, a trust scholar from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, explores various themes centered around the concept of trust, particularly in the realms of criminal justice, policing, and environmental health.
Joe discusses how trust plays a crucial role in the interaction between the public and law enforcement. He differentiates trust from legitimacy, explaining that while legitimacy concerns the acceptance of authority and its inherent power, trust focuses more on managing the vulnerability associated with this power. Hamm emphasizes that trust in police is significantly influenced by the public’s perception of potential internal harms (e.g., misuse of authority or excessive force) rather than just the external harms (like crime) that police are expected to protect against. His studies highlight variations in how different racial and ethnic groups perceive these harms and trust law enforcement.
Joe also talks about trust in the context of environmental contamination, specifically referring to a case involving Dow Chemical in Michigan. He illustrates how high levels of trust in Dow Chemical led the local community to underestimate the risks of dioxin contamination in nearby waters, which, in turn, affected their engagement in protective behaviors like avoiding consumption of contaminated fish. This part of the discussion underscores the complex impact trust can have on public health behaviors and risk assessment.
Joe advocates for bridging the gap between academic research on trust and its practical applications. He suggests that media platforms like podcasts can facilitate better communication between researchers and practitioners, potentially leading to more effective trust-building strategies in various sectors.
Research on Policing
So our work in the policing context really started with trying to see if this version of trust as rooted in vulnerability, might actually play in that context. And like you’ve heard from across the sessions that you’ve recorded, it does. Vulnerability does seem to be an important part of trust across contexts. But what we wanted to do was to pose kind of a really basic division of the kinds of harms we might experience from the police. We create law enforcement primarily to protect us from external harm or harm that’s external to that relationship, what we typically think of as criminal behavior, what we’re hoping for in most contexts is that the police will address our vulnerability to harm that’s beyond that relationship, that’s from other people. But when we empower law enforcement to handle those vulnerabilities, we necessarily increase the odds they might directly hurt us, what we call internal harm. And so the projects that you’re talking about here really focused on trying to make sense of, are those two types of vulnerabilities different, do they look different for different people and do they have different relationships with trust?
Trust in the police
When I talk with people about their trust in the police, it becomes very clear very quickly that for some people, when they think about harm that the police could cause, what they mean is I might be speeding validly pulled over and then be late to wherever I was going, but some people are worried that no matter what they do, the police might show up and kill them. Those are very different vulnerabilities, they feel, and they require very different things from the police to address them. Your question about the change in trust in the police over time? There are a number of international and national studies that have tracked things like trust in major institutions across geographic or different political areas. I’ve not yet found what I think is a consistent trend there. So you do see some dips in places, you do see some flat lines in places, some upward, some downward trends. But what I do see as a theme across those is, at least in my own mind, a mismatch between the way the police think about the vulnerability they generate and the vulnerability that the public feels that they generate. People are talking about this bad apples argument, that there are just some bad officers that manage to get into an otherwise good basket. If the police conceptualize the vulnerability there, as we need to find the problematic actors and remove them from law enforcement, which is super important.
About trust research
As I think about the big questions in trust research, they kind of flow from two of the things that I think we really know about trust or at least feel that we know. So one of them is that trust is associated with pro-social outcomes. I’ll talk about this all the time. It shows up in constantly, like everyone’s paper, everyone’s argument, trust is about pro-social stuff. And we also talk about how trust comes from our relationships, so we trust the people that we think deserve our trust. So what I would argue the big questions are is where are those two things break down. So on the anti-social side of this, if we trust someone, we can let go of the idea that we feel vulnerable and that’s something that we want to protect. And so we try hard to maintain our trust for as long as we possibly can, so we can avoid feeling vulnerable about things. But there’s some question of how far we’re prepared to go and how much we’re prepared to ignore to maintain that feeling of trust.