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EUROPEAN POLICE SCIENCE AND RESEARCH BULLETIN SPECIAL CONFERENCE EDITION Figure 5. Number of police officers per capita and trust in the police in 16 European countries 2010. Sources: European Sourcebook of Criminal Justice and European Social Survey. that case, the country-level correlation is -.66 (Figure 5). Therefore, the more police officers per inhabitant, the less the citizens trust them. 4. QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE A central factor generating trust in public administration is its ability to treat citizens fairly and justly. This means equal treatment of citizens regardless of their social status, ethnic background, age, gender or any other background factor (Rothstein & Teorell, 2008). Corruption can be considered a sign of the administration’s inability to treat citizens equally and impartially, and it can be seen as an important indicator of the general quality of administration (Holmberg et al., 2009). As we can see from Figure 6, the corruption of the administration seems to have a fairly strong connection with the trust in police on a country level; the correlation coefficient is as high as .91. Here the Corruption Perception Index 2010 of Transparency International is used as an indicator for corruption. The scale of the indicator is constructed so that a high value indicates a low level of corruption. 5. SOCIAL CAPITAL Trust in police means that we trust in the formal aspects of social control. On the other hand, we must keep in mind that the aspects of informal social control are at least equally important. If we have social capital, this means that we are members of several social networks, and that we have learned to trust the people around us. We trust not only those whom we know personally, we trust people in general. This is referred to as generalised trust (see Nannestad 2008; Paxton 2007). Social capital can therefore be seen as a resource for an individual, offering both unofficial social support and unofficial social control for the members of the community. Trust promotes interaction, which in turn increases trust. (See e.g. Putnam 2001 and Field 2004) Studies have also shown that the official social support offered by the society and the unofficial support from the immediate community do not exclude each other; on the contrary, they complement and support each other. Social capital has been found to be the strongest in countries with the most support for the welfare of the people thanks to the public welfare policy (Oorschot and Van Arts, 2005; Kääriäinen & Lehtonen 2006) 96
EUROPEAN POLICE SCIENCE AND RESEARCH BULLETIN SPECIAL CONFERENCE EDITION Figure 6. Corruption and trust in the police in 16 European countries 2010. Sources: Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index and European Social Survey. This means that we can assume that there is less need for formal support and control in societies with a lot of social capital than in countries with little social capital. In countries with strong social capital, the people probably expect less from the police than in countries with weaker social capital, and they also resort to unofficial support and control. On the other hand, in societies with less social interaction and trust people are forced to use the formal aspects of control and there are greater expectations on issues such as the police’s ability to act. As we see in Figure 7, the country-specific correlation between social capital (measured as generalised trust) and trust in the police Figure 7. Generalised trust and trust in the police in 16 European countries 2010. Source: European Social Survey. 97
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