Citizen Cooperation with the Police: Evidence from Contemporary Guatemala

Abstract

Community policing, and citizen cooperation with law enforcement more broadly, can improve local security outcomes by providing decentralized mechanisms for police accountability to local citizens. We hypothesize that five factors—alignment of citizen/police interests, relative costs of cooperation, costs of crime, prevalence of others’ cooperation, and perceived police efficacy—comprise a decision framework that guides citizens’ choices regarding whether to share information with law enforcement. We find evidence for this framework using rich survey and survey experimental data from a large nation-wide survey of Guatemalans and municipal administrative data. Our results indicate that increasing police efficacy, witness protection, and neighborhood trust boost the odds of cooperation with police by up to 55%. At a time when conversations about the relationship between community and police are widespread, this research offers insights into conditions under which cooperation between community members and law enforcement is most likely to occur.

Ethnicity and Policing in the Global South: Descriptive Representation and Expectations of Police Bias

“…Our study therefore joins a growing body of research that suggests civilians from historically marginalized ethnic groups in Global South settings prefer police officers who are coethnic (Curtice, 2022) and embedded in their local community (Denny et al, 2022), and police forces that are more inclusive of minority groups (Nanes, 2018, 2020). 17 We anticipate that these findings on the role of coethnicity and descriptive representation in conditioning police-civilian interactions are likely to hold in other settings where there is a mismatch between the institutionalized composition of the police force and the populations the force is charged with policing.…”

Voting with Their Guns: An Integrated Framework of How Police Politically Administer Violence

“…Alternatively, police may interpret the standard goals of punitive policies, such as more arrests, seizures, or clearance rates, as impinging on the flexibility they require to regulate crime (Muir 1979, 10). They may also perceive that punitive policies undermine their social legitimacy and reduce citizens' willingness to cooperate with them, which is fundamental to solve crimes (Denny et al 2022). Finally, police commanders may worry that political mandates, either inciting or restraining violence, will spark dissatisfaction or dissent amongst their subordinates, thus reducing the organization's cohesion.…”

State Absence, Vengeance, and the Logic of Vigilantism in Guatemala

“…For example, indigenous Maya practices include a diverse range of punishments, ranging from lynchings to lashings, walking on knees to ask for forgiveness from the earth, public shaming, and receiving advice from Mayan authorities or family members (e.g., Hawkins et al, 2013;Sieder, 2020). In indigenous communities, people may take justice into their own hands because they perceive the state authorities-the PNC in particular-as illegitimate and seek their response for crimes at lower rates (e.g., Denny et al, 2023). These communities may also have a different concept of justice than the state's legal system (Sieder, 2011).…”