Ethnicity and Trust: Perceptions of Police Bias
| Author | Jane Goodman-Delahunty,Diane Sivasubramaniam |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijps.2008.10.4.094 |
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Ethnicity and trust: perceptions of police
bias
Diane Sivasubramaniam§and Jane Goodman-Delahunty‡
§(Corresponding author) Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies, University
of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) 2000 Simcoe St N, Oshawa, ON, L1H 7K4.
Tel: 00 1 905 721 8668; email: diane.sivasubramaniam@uoit.ca
‡School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Tel: +61 2 9385 3755; Fax: +61 2 9385 3641; email: jdelahunty@psy.unsw.edu.au
Received 21 July 2007; accepted 2 January 2008
Keywords: attitudes to police, police bias, minority ethnic groups, police
targetting
Diane Sivasubramaniam
is an Assistant Pro-
fessor in the Faculty of Criminology, Justice and
Policy Studies at UOIT. Her research interests
include cross-cultural issues in the legal system,
restorative justice, and procedural and distrib-
utive justice judgments in response to legal
procedures.
Jane Goodman-Delahunty
is an Associate Pro-
fessor in the Department of Psychology at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney, Aus-
tralia. She served as the editor of Psychiatry,
Psychology and Law from 2001 to 2006 and her
research interests include employment discrim-
ination, sexual harassment, workplace violence,
dispute resolution, decision-making, stereo-
typing, jury behaviour, and the psychology of
compensation.
A
BSTRACT
This study explores trust in police among a
university sample of ethnic minority youth in
Sydney, Australia, specifically examining the
degree to which police are perceived to be biased
against respondents’ own particular ethnic groups.
Results from this university sample replicate those
found in previous community studies. By con-
sidering more specific questions regarding percep-
tions of police bias, this study further reveals that
young minority groups consider police to be
biased against their own ethnic group significantly
more than do Caucasian youth. However, both
minority youth and the Caucasian majority
believe that police target certain ethnic groups,
and generally agree on the particular groups that
they perceive are targeted by police. These findings
imply that perceptions of police bias are not
restricted to minorities.
INTRODUCTION
Previous research has consistently demon-
strated that public confidence in the justice
system is determined, in large part, by trust
in police. For example, trust in police is an
important predictor of public attitudes to
police weaponry in the United Kingdom
(Cooke, Puddifoot, & Brown, 2001). When
citizens trust police, they are more likely to
perceive police authority as legitimate, and
thus more likely to cooperate with author-
ities and comply with the law (Sunshine &
Tyler, 2003). Trust in police is linked to the
ability of police officers to provide basic
citizen security (Goldsmith, 2003). There-
fore, factors that promote or inhibit cit-
izens’ trust in police warrant additional
study.
Race has emerged as the strongest socio-
demographic predictor of negative attitudes
Page 388
International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 10 Number 4
International Journal of Police
Science and Management,
Vol. 10 No. 4, 2008, pp. 388–401.
DOI: 10.1350/ijps.2008.10.4.094
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