Māori and Black Americans trust police less for the same two reasons, Otago-led surveys find

Kappmeier's team split trust into two kinds. Under the Intergroup Trust Model, cognitive trust is a rational assessment of how trustworthy someone is. Affective trust is a more intuitive judgement that takes the specific relationship into account ^[8]. For the two minority groups, the gap was on the affective side ^[9]. "In both cities, we found Māori and Black Americans' lower trust was driven by a perceived lack of compassion and compatibility toward them," Kappmeier said ^[2]. She went further: "This shows that for marginalized communities, trust in the police seems to be more relational and affective; trust depends on the extent to which the police are perceived as attuned to their group's welfare and sharing the same values, customs or background, rather than just whether or not the police are perceived as effective," she said ^[9].

The cross-country match is the striking part of the paper. Kappmeier said the similarities were fascinating, especially given that the surveys took place in different countries years apart ^[4]. At least six years separate them ^[14]. A pattern that holds across that distance is harder to put down to one city's circumstances. What it identifies is a proximate driver: how respondents see the police today. History comes earlier in the chain. A sense that police do not care about a community can grow from a different past in each city and still produce the same answer on a questionnaire.

I'd treat the shared-driver result as a sound target for a trial, and no more than that yet. The minority comparisons rest on subsets of the two city samples, and the release does not say how large those subsets are ^[7]. Survey answers of this kind show which perceptions go along with lower trust. Showing that raising perceived compassion raises trust needs a different design. Police would change what they do in some neighbourhoods, and trust would be measured before and after against neighbourhoods where nothing changed.

Kappmeier draws her policy conclusion from the differences between groups. She said a one-size-fits-all approach to building trust in communities is not sufficient ^[3]. "Instead, trust interventions need to recognize the different pathways through which trust can be built," she said ^[5]. She also argued that police have a stake in the result: "Trust is vital for police officers to work and engage safely in the communities, while people need to trust the police so they feel comfortable to reach out to them if in need," she said ^[12].