Citizen participation in the police domain: The role of citizens’ attitude and morality

Abstract

Although there is a large potential of citizen capital in fighting crime and creating safer neighborhoods, in reality, only a small fraction of citizens is actively participating. This study examines the relationship between different types of actual participation behavior in the police domain from a citizen's stance and 3 different but interconnected psychological drivers: the attitude toward citizen participation, moral values, and moral emotions. A total of 217 Dutch citizens filled out an online questionnaire, assessing these drivers and the actual participatory actions they engaged in over the past year. The results show that 4 broad categories of participation behavior can be distinguished: social control (e.g., correcting others regarding their behavior); responsive participation (e.g., calling the police); collaborative participation (e.g., meeting with a police officer); and detection (e.g., joining a neighborhood watch). As expected, moral values had an indirect influence on participation via attitude and moral emotions. The attitude toward citizen participation was positively related to all four types of reported behavior, while the influence of moral emotions only related to social control and responsive behavior. These results can be used in the design and testing of interventions to stimulate citizen participation.

Police volunteers in the Netherlands: a study on policy and practice

“…In the United Kingdom, Jordan (2012) cautiously claims that long-term investment in citizen participation may have a positive impact on strengthening a 'moral order' built from face-to-face contacts, reciprocity, and mutual care. Quantitative research by Schreurs et al (2018) also indicates that 'moral values' and 'moral emotions' are important drivers behind a positive attitude towards active citizenship in the police domain. Furthermore, volunteer participation in policing can help build openness and trust between public professionals and society at large.…”

Why do citizens become a member of an online neighbourhood watch? A case study in The Netherlands

“…Past research has shown that these emotions have an effect on moral behaviour in general (e.g. prosocial behaviour) (Harkness & Hitlin, 2014;Teper, Zhong, & Inzlicht, 2015), and more specifically on participation behaviour in the police domain (Schreurs, Kerstholt, de Vries, & Giebels, 2018b). The latter study also showed that the experience of other-condemning emotions such anger influence responsive participation (e.g.…”

“…However, they did not have any effect on detection (e.g. joining networks such as Amber alert, or neighbourhood watches) (Schreurs et al, 2018b).…”

“…joining amber alert or an online neighbourhood watch) were not affected by emotions. In a similar vein, becoming a member of a Neighbourhood-WhatsApp group can also be considered as a more preventive and long-term action (Schreurs et al, 2018b). We would expect that emotions have a large influence in more reactive situations, such as the moment in which a perpetrator was stopped.…”

“…On the individual level, the Community Engagement Theory takes three individual drivers into account; risk perception, self-efficacy and response efficacy into account (Kerstholt et al, 2017;Paton et al, 2008). Previous research, however, showed that emotions were also an important driver for preparedness behaviour for natural hazards (Kerstholt et al, 2017;Terpstra, 2011) and, even more important for the present context, for citizen participation in the safety domain as well (Schreurs, Kerstholt, de Vries, & Giebels, 2018a). For this reason, negative emotions were added to the model for the purpose of this study.…”