A Transparency Statement Improves Trust in Community-Police Interactions
New research from UVA Batten assistant professor Kyle S. H. Dobson has identified a simple and cost-effective method for improving police interactions with community members that requires only ten small words. In a paper published last month in Nature Communications, Dobson and his co-researchers found that an officer stating a benevolent intention up front — something as simple as, “I’m walking around trying to get to know the community,” — made a substantial difference in how community members responded.
Over the past three decades, billions have been invested in community policing to foster positive interactions between officers and community members. Yet, public trust in police continues to decline. Our qualitative analysis of over 500 hours of naturalistic observations suggests a potential reason: the questioning styles of officers in community policing may make community members feel threatened.
Observations also point to a solution: transparent communication of benevolent intent. Building on this, a pre-registered field experiment (N = 232) finds that community members feel less threatened and report greater trust when officers use a brief transparency statement (e.g., “I’m walking around trying to get to know the community”).
These findings are supported by exploratory natural language processing and sympathetic nervous system measures. Six online experiments (total N = 3210) further show that transparency statements are effective across diverse groups and isolate the conditions where they work best. This multi-method investigation underscores the importance of transparency in fostering positive community-police relations.
