Examining Item-, Individual-, and Contextual-levels of Ethnic Effect on Willingness to Call the Police

The relationship between ethnicity and police-related outcomes has garnered significant attention from researchers. Although prior research has advanced scholarship, important questions still remain. First, previous studies about perceptions of police legitimacy have been conducted without examining whether this measure functions the same for different ethnic groups. Second, only a few studies have examined the effect of ethnicity on willingness to call the police, and they have produced mixed findings. Third, little attention has been paid to the effect of ethnic context on willingness to call the police. Against this backdrop, this dissertation extends prior work by providing an empirical assessment of willingness to call the police in relation to item-, individual-, and contextual-levels of ethnic effect. Specifically, Chapter 2 examines whether the perceptions of police legitimacy measure is invariant between Whites and Hispanics. Chapter 3 applies the group position thesis and Tyler’s process-based model of policing to assess the relationship between ethnicity and willingness to call the police. Chapter 4 investigates the extent to which theoretical arguments drawn from the minority threat perspective and social disorganization theory can be applied to explain the relationship between ethnic context and willingness to call the police. Using data collected from the Arizona Crime Victimization Survey (AZCVS) and the US Census, this dissertation produces three main findings. First, Chapter 2 finds that the perceptions of police legitimacy measure functions consistently across White and Hispanic subsamples. Second, Chapter 3 finds that Hispanics tended to show a lower level of trust in police compared to Whites, which in turn resulted in their unwillingness to call the police. This finding partially supports the notion that the group position thesis and Tyler’s process-based model can be combined to explain the relationship between ethnicity and willingness to call the police. Third, Chapter 4 finds that ethnic context affects individual willingness to call the police, partially through perceived risk of property crime victimization, suggesting that the minority threat perspective may be better able to explain the relationship between ethnic context and willingness to call the police than social disorganization theory. Given these findings, their implications for theory, future research, and policy are discussed.