Police Professionalism and Citizen Evaluation

It was hyp'ed that the citizen's evaluation of a law enforcement agency would depend importantly on its effectiveness in preventing crime & apprehending suspects. It was also hyp'ed that the police would be more favorably evaluated if restraints & equity were exercised in the application of law. Data from 2 sources were used to test this: (a) an interview survey conducted by Florida State U's Instit for Soc Res; (b) random interviews (total N = 284) in the central cities of 5 Fla metropolitan counties. Effectiveness in apprehension was found to be positively associated with high evaluation of the police. The relationship between the number of crimes per 100,000 pop & evaluations also conforms to expectations, but the negative relationship is weak. Citizen perception of police reliance on force was found to be related to a positive evaluation of the police. A negative relationship was found between high professionalism & high evaluation. It is suggested that evaluation of the police is a projection of the citizen's sense of access to gov rather than a direct judgment of police service. Citizens seem to be most dissatisfied when their highly professionalized police seem incapable of managing the high incidence of crime. 1 Table. M. Maxfield.