Effective policing requires citizen cooperation (Alpert et al 1998; Skogan, 1998). To stimulate such cooperation, many policing initiatives attempt to make police “part of the community”. Integrating police into the community can be challenging, however, especially in communities with a history of poor resident-police relations, fragile and conflict settings. One means of improving resident cooperation with police is to increase residents’ perceptions of police legitimacy and trustworthiness (Hawdon, 2008).
Though widely acknowledged, but there is a lack of evidence of institutionalising practices or strategies for building ‘citizen trust of police’ and ‘perceptions of police legitimacy’, especially within fragile context of post-conflict countries, with few exceptions. Within this context, though there is high technology prevalence within policing, but there’s little relationship between the choice of technologies and strategies to build trust with citizens. Most popular technologies used in policing include: car cameras, information-sharing platforms, like social media, body-worn cameras (BWCs), geographic information system technology cell phone tracking software, or investigative case-management softwares, analytical and visual-based technology (like license plate readers), (Strom, 2017).
This said, in our work while exploring this relationship empirically, we did find that trust and legitimacy operate different within different social settings, this may be dependent on local levels of social capital. Also we have tried to understand ‘community policing’ with three dimensions: developing community partnerships, engaging in problem solving, and implementing community policing organizational features.
