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Results of Attitude Towards Police (ATP) surveys regarding Santa Barbara Police Department and UC Santa Barbara Police Department, Chief MacPherson and "the importance of communicating respect and concern for the needs of community members, one person at a time".

The opening of the Center on Police Practices and Community (COPPAC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara ~ Researching Today for a Safer Tomorrow ~

Law enforcement continually walks a fine-line between the protection and the violation of individual rights. It derives its power from the community it serves, and it is accountable to that community. To ensure the latter, some cities have implemented community review systems that monitor police conduct. These systems are intended to be impartial evaluators of law enforcement, in particular, complaints against law enforcement. We analyze the various structures and characteristics of community review systems, as well as the empirical research attending them. In doing so, we situate the problems associated with community review systems from a social psychological perspective, arguing that their shortcomings may be remedied through a consideration of intergroup processes which focus on shared identity and the role of power differentiation between police and community. Finally, we suggest improvements and further research.

In this chapter, we focus on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT)'s utility for analyzing one under-studied domain of intergroup communication, namely police-civilian encounters. By so doing, we focus on one aspect of institutional talk where a power imbalance is clearly evident. In addition to presenting recent self-report data relevant to this initiative, new intercultural data from China, Taiwan and the US, are also introduced. But first, we overview some important assumptions and concepts of the theory, interlaced with a selection of empirical research studies.

This chapter spotlights communication accommodation theory (CAT: see Giles, Coupland & Coupland, 1991) -- a longstanding framework (Gallois, Ogay & Giles, 2005: Giles, 1973) that has been heralded as one of the most prominent in the social psychology of language (Tracy & Haspel, 2004) and one that has captured cross-disciplinary imaginations (Coupland & Jaworski, 1997). The theory has had a hsitory of application to an array of organizational contexts (e.g. Bourhis, 1991) and, herein, we add another exciting possibility, namely its relevance for a more incisive appreciation of understanding police-civilian relations. After a brief discussion about what images people hold of police officers, we introduce CAT with particular attention to its face and identity concerns, whilst we distil the theoretical essence of CAT down to four key principles, underscoring its potential for developing not only an innovative reserach agenda for the future, but also for suggesting new theoretical propositions to test in this applied domain.

While there is a burgeoning literature on diverse aspects of intergroup communication and some attention to media depictions of police officers and policing, very little research addresses communicative dimensions of police-civilian encounters. This is important to the extent that while it has been estimated that the vast amount of police training is devoted to physical compliance issues, 98% of actual law enforcement practice revolves around communicating with the public and its safety needs. Thus, the communication between police officers and civilians warrants examination. In this chapter, we overview the separate literatures on attitudes toward the police and communication accommodation theory. The findings of three studies are presented exploring the role of accommodation, alongside socio-demographic and other variables, in predicting attitudes toward police. The three studies encompass three different populations: English-speaking adults, Spanish-speaking adults, and university students. Analyses reveal similar results across the samples. In general, accommodation by officers predicts civilians’ rating of officer performance as well as satisfaction when interacting with the police. These findings suggest that more attention should be directed at developing communication skills in general and accommodative ones in particular.

Surveys (available separately on eRepository) were administered to 32 UC Santa Barbara students before and after touring the Santa Barbara County Jail. Respondents' perceptions of law enforcement (attitude toward police: ATP) increased significantly along five dimensions.This study demonstrates not only the immediate benefit to law enforcement in exposing the public to the inside of jails, but the major role that communication plays in how the community perceives law enforcement.Understanding the role of communication in police--community relations can open the door to police--community partnerships that improve the effectiveness and safety of both community members and law enforcement officers.

This instrument is used to compare attitudes toward law enforcement before and after county jail tours.