Police responses to violent incidents, disorder and ethnically motivated disputes continue to challenge and drain their resources. In the post 9/11 era new types of public safety emergencies, coupled with a range of contemporary ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological issues, create new challenges for the police and raise public concern about the growing social isolation and marginalisation of particular groups. Incidents like the Cronulla riots in Sydney; feelings of social and political isolation amongst Australian Muslims; periodic violence between Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians in Brisbane’s “mortgage belt;” and the rapid in-migration of new arrivals from the “Horn of Africa” into suburban and regional communities across Australia potentially challenge and erode community perceptions of police legitimacy.

Our research aims to understand more about:

• The role of individual police in building citizen trust;
• The role of collectivities of police (ie police teams, police divisions and other operational groupings) in building citizen trust and perceptions of legitimacy;
• The dynamic community-level processes that facilitate or constrain the establishment of institutional legitimacy;
• How interventions designed to improve citizen trust in individual police, as well as perceptions of agency-wide legitimacy, impact on citizen compliance, cooperation, levels of inter-group conflict, inter-group violence, crime and disorder more generally, citizen reporting of incidents, complaints against police, and citizen satisfaction with police; and
• How these outcomes vary across different types of communities (e.g. Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese etc.).