Police violence reduces trust in the police among Black residents

Abstract

Recent high-profile incidents involving the shooting or killing of unarmed Black men have intensified the debate about how police violence affects trust in the criminal justice system, particularly among communities of color. In this article, we propose a quasi-experimental design that leverages the timing of the shooting of Jacob Blake by the Kenosha Police Department relative to when a large survey was fielded in the city of Chicago. We demonstrate that individuals interviewed 4 weeks before and 4 weeks after the shooting are comparable across a large set of observed characteristics, thus approximating an experimental setting. We find that Blake's shooting caused substantial reductions in Black respondents' trust in the police, concentrated among younger residents and criminalized residents. These results suggest that police violence against racial minorities may lead to lower civic engagement and cooperation with law enforcement in those communities, exacerbating issues of public safety and community well-being. The pronounced distrust among younger Black residents suggests a generational rift that could risk further entrenching systemic biases and inequalities within the criminal justice system. Additionally, the higher levels of distrust among criminalized respondents could have implications for research detailing this population's decreased willingness to engage with public institutions more broadly.

Fig 1. Trust in law enforcement among the Black and white respondents included in the analyses.

Data are from the 2020 Healthy Chicago Survey. The sample includes 584 Black respondents and 939 white respondents interviewed in the four weeks prior and four weeks after the shooting of Jacob Blake. The survey question underlying the graphs is “To what extent do you trust your law enforcement agency?”.

Fig 2. City-wide share of survey participants that reported trust in law enforcement in the days before and after Blake’s shooting.

Fig 3. Changes in trust in law enforcement after Jacob Blake’s shooting among Black respondents.

Data are from the 2020 HCS survey. The survey question used to create the measure of trust in law enforcement is “To what extent do you trust your law enforcement agency?” We code answers to this question as binary, taking on value 1 for those that responded “a great extent” or “somewhat” and 0 for the rest. Each pair of point estimates shows the change in the probability of expressing trust for those surveyed one, two, three, and four weeks after Jacob Blake’s shooting, relative to the pool of survey respondents interviewed in the four weeks prior. Within each pair of estimates, we show results with and without the set of controls listed in Table 2. Confidence intervals are at the 95% level with standard errors robust to heteroskedasticity.

Fig 4. Changes in trust in law enforcement after Jacob Blake’s shooting among White respondents.

Data are from the 2020 HCS survey. The survey question used to create the measure of trust in law enforcement is “To what extent do you trust your law enforcement agency?” We code answers to this question as binary, taking on value 1 for those that responded “a great extent” or “somewhat” and 0 for the rest. Each pair of point estimates shows the change in the probability of expressing trust for those surveyed one, two, three, and four weeks after Jacob Blake’s shooting, relative to the pool of survey respondents interviewed in the four weeks prior. Within each pair of estimates, we show results with and without the set of controls listed in Table 2. Confidence intervals are at the 95% level with standard errors robust to heteroskedasticity.