WSHU Discussion on Community Policing with Kyle Peyton

WSHU’s Ron Ropiak hosted an episode on Oct. 3 on “Community Policing” prompted by a new paper by Kyle Peyton, “A Field Experiment on Community Policing and Police Legitimacy,” published in PNAS and co-authored by Michael Sierra-Arévalo and David Rand.

The study surveyed the response of 2000 people in the New Haven community, randomly assigning half of the homes to receive visits from the New Haven Police Department. Trained officers went door to door for a friendly non-enforcement, nonaggressive visit and introduced themselves. The researchers followed up with the community and found that the effects remained positive and built trust three weeks after the interaction, and that the positive results were largest among nonwhite respondents.

Community policing has been around a long time, but this is the first study that has attempted to estimate the impact and see if it works.  “Police departments have limited resources and it’s nice to have some data that this is effective,” Peyton says. 

Other people on the show were Robert Kalamaras, Captain, Special Services Bureau, Fairfield Police Department; Terry Blake, Lieutenant, public information officer and commander, Community Police Services, Norwalk Police Department; and Gary MacNamara, Retired Chief, Fairfield Police Department; executive director, Public Safety and Government Affairs, Sacred Heart University.

Listen to the entire program here.