NCJ Number
223127
Journal
Criminology and Criminal Justice: An International Journal Volume: 8 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2008 Pages: 185-202
Date Published
2008
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article examines police effectiveness and trustworthiness in Ghana.
Abstract
The results show the salient role that perceptions of police effectiveness can play in public assessment of police trustworthiness; perceptions of police effectiveness had both a direct and indirect relationship with police trustworthiness. People are concerned with the ability of the police to provide them with security in their neighborhoods, and the extent to which the police are able to meet this expectation significantly shapes their trustworthiness among the public. The influence of police effectiveness is powerfully mediated by the perception that the police are procedurally fair. Even where the police are very effective maintaining law and order, and in reducing crime and victimization in citizens’ neighborhoods, people may yet be less inclined to have substantial trust in them if they continue to disregard normative expectation of fair treatment. Standard background characteristics such as age, gender, educational attainment, and political affiliation are irrelevant in people’s assessments of the trustworthiness of the police in Ghana. This is inconsistent with much of the general literature of public attitudes towards the police, which reports the salience of these background factors. The findings are significant as they show that building public trust in the police requires democratic reforms that simultaneously improve the capacity of the police to achieve both substantive effectiveness and procedural fairness. Data were collected using multistage sampling techniques involving the random selection of 450 households from Census Enumeration Areas in Accra, Ghana. Table, figures, references