Community social capital, police performance, and trust in the police: Choices of policing styles in China

Abstract Recent empirical studies have underscored the crucial link between police performance and trust in the police. Nevertheless, the association between police performance and trust in the police under various conditions deserves more attention. Moreover, the collective meaning of social capital is largely omitted from previous studies on the impact of social capital on trust in the police. The current study explores how police performance impacts public trust across varying levels of community social capital. Using factor analysis and multilevel binary logistic regression on data from a survey of 997 respondents in Xiamen, China, the current study found that both police performance and community social capital significantly enhanced trust in the police, while community social capital moderated the relationship between police performance and trust in the police. As community social capital increases, the importance of procedural fairness in building police trust grows, whereas the impact of outcome effectiveness diminishes. Findings of the current study advocate for a tailored approach to policing: communities rich in social capital benefit from a focus on procedural fairness (process-oriented policing), whereas those with lower social capital prioritize the effectiveness of outcomes (outcome-oriented policing).