#13 - Public Trust in Policing: Are we even ready to begin the conversation? – Joe Hamm

In this episode, Professor Joe Hamm discusses the role of public trust in policing. We talk about the current national crisis, what needs to happen before the process of building trust in policing can even begin, why it is so important, and his research on the subject.  

Joe Hamm is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Environmental Science at Michigan State University. A psychologist by training, his work lies at the nexus of government and the public where he investigates what trust is, how best to appropriately measure it, and its connection to "outcomes" like cooperation and compliance. Joe’s work spans a number of governmental contexts, seeking to use research on trust in trustees like the police, courts, water infrastructure managers, natural resource authorities, and a variety of state and federal entities to develop a cross-boundary social science of trust.

Joe works closely with a variety of criminal justice and environmental organizations, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Trust Research and Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law. His teaching responsibilities include CJ 905 (Law and Society), CJ 908 (The Cross-Boundary Social Science of Trust in the Institutional Context), and ESP 804 (Environmental Applications and Analysis). Joe also supervises the School of Criminal Justice’s doctoral traineeship in the State Courts and Society.
https://cj.msu.edu/directory/hamm-joseph.html
Twitter: @istudytrust

Tom Baker in a 2018 Tillman Scholar and has been a PhD student in UMSL's Criminology and Criminal Justice program since 2017. Tom received his BA in Political Science from Arizona State University and worked as a police officer for approximately nine years. His research interests include police culture, use of force, and qualitative research methods. https://pattillmanfoundation.org/meet-our-scholars/thomas-baker/
Twitter: @thomasowenbaker

Research Discussed:
Hamm, J. A., Trinkner, R., & Carr, J. D. (2017). Fair process, trust, and cooperation: Moving toward an integrated framework of police legitimacy. Criminal justice and behavior, 44(9), 1183-1212.

Abstract:
Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the process-based model of legitimacy and the classic model of trust. Our results suggest that although both are predictive, the models can be integrated in a way that allows the strengths of each model to address the weaknesses of the other. We therefore present this model as a first step toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy that can meaningfully incorporate much of the existing scholarship and provide clearer guidance for those who seek to address these constructs in research and practice.

Keywords policing, legitimacy, trust, procedural fairness, trustworthiness

Transcript

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Tom Baker: Hey, thanks again thanks again for coming, already gave like a brief intro, but

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Tom Baker: I always found that it's when before we talk about people's before I talk with someone about their interests. It's always interesting to find out a little bit about who they are and the lens that they've developed over time to see them the material.

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Tom Baker: With which they do the material. So maybe

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Tom Baker: Tell me, like where you, where you grew up.

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Joseph Hamm: A little bit, yeah. So the first version, military, which means I kind of grew up a little bit of everywhere. So we were about four years. I mean, each place that we were, I think, probably the most formative though was Georgia. So George or Colorado probably right. So most of the time.

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Tom Baker: Air Force.

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Joseph Hamm: Army. Actually, my mom was Air Force until I was born, but then

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Tom Baker: Okay, and in in Georgia for Fort Benning, or we're

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Tom Baker: Okay, I, I was stationed at Fort Benning for a while.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah.

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Tom Baker: I went to airborne school there and I went to basic training and a

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Tom Baker: Ranger training there. So I'm very familiar with, with Georgia.

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Joseph Hamm: I saw some pictures of the jump towers, the other day and I had a bit of an established

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Tom Baker: Oh yeah, my whole my whole below my waist, my knees and ankles have nostalgia every morning.

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Joseph Hamm: I don't, I

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Tom Baker: Don't have here, so. So you moved it moved around a lot. What

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Tom Baker: What did. Was there some kind of like experience or set of experiences or people you knew or

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Tom Baker: Some sort of thing that led you to study with sleep because you study sort of

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Tom Baker: Police and trust a trust and police and he said, what

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Tom Baker: What sort of drew here. What, what brought you here.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah, so when I started, I started undergrad I had some conversations and starting to have a lot of fun conversations with friends about like criminal profiling kinds of things.

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Joseph Hamm: And so I thought, criminal justice was definitely the way for it do for an undergrad degree, not knowing at all how wrong I was about trying to make that connection between them.

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Joseph Hamm: But I got started and I in one of my early CJ classes, a professor give a presentation. Doug Woody, he said, University of Colorado.

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Joseph Hamm: And you give a presentation about law sake. It clicked for me. And that was really what I cared about and what I wanted to do so I worked with him on a jury decision making project.

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Joseph Hamm: And after I graduated undergrad I worked did a NSF, are you just kind of like try out this grad school thing for undergrads. I did that at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln also enjoy your decision making.

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Joseph Hamm: And started grad school knowing I was absolutely going to do Dre decision making and almost immediately stopped doing jury decision making.

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Joseph Hamm: But I was moved into a project that my advisor had looking at attitudes towards the courts.

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Joseph Hamm: And we had a initial problem and trying. We just wanted to mention we just wanted to measure of trust in the courts. So I was kind of sent off on this mission.

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Joseph Hamm: Along with another colleague of mine to go find a good measure of trust and it took so much time in was such a complicated question.

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Joseph Hamm: That ended up being a big chunk of what we did as part of that research team for the whole time I was in grad school, and I fell in love with it and I've just never got now. Okay.

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Tom Baker: So yeah, it's sort of like it was an academic more of an academic route so your, your intellectual interests.

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Tom Baker: Brought

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Tom Baker: To a space and you guys identified sort of a hole in the literature and you found other filling these gaps in the literature.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah, that's exactly what it was.

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Joseph Hamm: With it makes me laugh about it. I'm sure this is just me being self indulgent will make me laugh because I kept having aha moments to things that didn't end up being ran was like, oh, it's this. And then I took that road to find another place to kind of CAP. CAP.

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Tom Baker: So like kind of piecing things together like a little bit of a puzzle.

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Tom Baker: So yeah, so I i've always been one of the things I'm really interested is public trust and policing and

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Tom Baker: So I would have been interested in this, before the world before this, these uprisings and murder and Minneapolis.

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Tom Baker: But a lot of people's attention has been drawn to this subject matter. And I think at the end while I was interested, while I was interested before this.

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Tom Baker: I'm in the process of changing so like my my perspective on things I'm unsure of a lot of things and I'm in the process of changing my views on everything, including trust and policing.

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Tom Baker: And I recently I recently saw you had made a post and social media, which is there's a lot of communication taking place on this topic and I, I just wanted to maybe if you could just for a minute how you your perspectives may have been are in flux.

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Tom Baker: Us. Tell us a little bit what you said and where you are.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah, no, for sure. Um, so that was probably the first of my what I'm lovingly referred to as my frustrated close to the last couple of weeks, but

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Joseph Hamm: What I'm finding in myself as I'm dealing with my own personal frustration, it obviously is so closely attached to what I researched and what I study

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Joseph Hamm: That I keep trying to have this this professional or research base theoretically based kind of cut foot in this my Twitter profile just read this was

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Joseph Hamm: And so I keep finding myself really excited when I've got something that allows me to kind of hit both my personal frustration and my research interests. And so what I was trying to stay in that post

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Joseph Hamm: Was that

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Joseph Hamm: A lot of. There are a lot of conversations about the the nexus of the riots and the existence in the absence of public trusting and what it means for people to

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Joseph Hamm: Preview while people are protesting what that means for us and what the reforms that the police do on the other end of this, what impact that would have on public trust.

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Joseph Hamm: And when I was trying to to to argue in that post is that we're not really in a moment of trust right now with this question of what should police be doing to rebuild public trust.

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Joseph Hamm: feels kind of like the wrong one. So trust is really rooted in uncertainty trust is rooted in the fact that, you know, when people interact with each other.

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Joseph Hamm: Both of them can make decisions and those decisions could results at heart to the other person. And so trust is what we use as humans to navigate that question of

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Joseph Hamm: There is someone else who's around me that other person can make a decision that decision could hurt me. How do I feel about that and how do I react to them in that space.

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Joseph Hamm: And that takes on a whole nother level when we're talking about government because of the power of the virtual assistant that there's real real potential for real injury.

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Joseph Hamm: In a way that maybe when you're walking into an elevator with someone, there's still a question of trust, whether or not you get into the elevator. But it's, it doesn't have necessarily the same repercussions that some of the government questions do

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Tom Baker: They may not, they usually don't have a legal right to kick kick your ass and the elevator.

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Joseph Hamm: The idea that there's this there's this power structure when you're getting into an elevator with someone. There's, you can call the police if something goes wrong. And if the police don't do something you can go to the courts and have something

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Joseph Hamm: Something civil you lose some of that structure when the other person is government, whether you lose it. In fact, or you lose it in perspective as an argument. I really can't. I can't eat too. Like, I can't say that.

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Joseph Hamm: The courts wouldn't come to your aid if something happened with the police and obviously there are cases where they have in their cases where they haven't. And that's, that's

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Joseph Hamm: The thing for legal scholar to debate in the way that I just don't have the expertise for but at least in the minds of the people who are in that interaction, it's, it's the who you call him when the cops have a problem question right it's it's different when you're talking about

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Tom Baker: Yeah, and as a person. One of the things that

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Tom Baker: So I've been involved in use of force incidents plenty. When I was an officer and what we would do is it just like any other organization you rely on people with expertise to handle

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Tom Baker: A certain problem that you encounter. So when we would use use of use of force. It was never the officer that used for us who wrote the report.

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Tom Baker: It was always another officer on the squad.

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Tom Baker: And I was probably the best writer on my squad. Most of the time I was a good writer, compared to most of my squad MATES. IS ONE OF MY better one of my skills as an officer was reading good reports.

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Tom Baker: So I was I was selected to write. Not always, but a lot of the time to write that report because I had the ability to articulate

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Tom Baker: Things in such a way as to make it more palatable to anyone that might review it. Yeah. So there's like when you enter that relationship with the police. It's not as though on the other side of that encounter. There's going to be some fair

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Tom Baker: articulation of what actually happened.

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Tom Baker: It's going to be the the narrative that's created surrounding that event is going to be going to be generated by people who have an emotional

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Tom Baker: And professional attachment to the individuals who used the violence. So even if it's justified. It's made to sound more justified than it was. And it was borderline it's major, it's a so I really, I really appreciate that.

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Tom Baker: That point because there's, it's different when you're with the police. It's very different.

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Tom Baker: So what is our

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Joseph Hamm: The power differences in just about what you can do to hurt the other person. It's control over the process. It's exactly what you're talking about when something happens.

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Joseph Hamm: You don't have you don't have equal footing in terms of this is the cop story. And this is the person's story.

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Joseph Hamm: And even when you stand in front of a judge and both of you disagree. You don't. You still don't have equal footing. There's a power differential moves through the entire process. It's not just the fact that there's a gun on their head that's

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Joseph Hamm: A great point that you're making that it's not just the instrumentality. It's not just the physical thing I can do in the interaction, there's more. There's more, I guess.

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Tom Baker: It's like also like if you were to another house even be the, the, maybe, I don't know if I'm about I'm screwed this up. But correct me if

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Tom Baker: If you're involved in a romantic relationship where there's a level of quality.

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Tom Baker: And you're building trust is very different if say you're in your graduate student in a romantic relationship with a professor or, you know, there's a describe when there's a discrepancy and power changes the nature of

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Tom Baker: How trust forms. It's part when you introduce power and to trust. I think it changes in a variety of venues. What do you think

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Joseph Hamm: I do so.

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Joseph Hamm: Without being able to speak to your exact

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Joseph Hamm: Concrete like the romantic relationship part of our absolutely does change vulnerability. It changes how so I guess I should start with

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Joseph Hamm: The definition of trust that I use is kind of taking on favor in the in that wider trust literature is this idea that it's a willingness to accept vulnerability. So it's a willingness and the person who says that I trust.

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Joseph Hamm: To recognize it's it's a recognition that the other person can make decisions that can cause harm to you and a willingness to accept that interaction, not a potential for harm.

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Joseph Hamm: And what that means is that how you can be heard and how you think you can be hurt or critical to what your trust assessment or the level of trust that you have

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Joseph Hamm: And I do think that anytime you're talking about a power differential, whether you're talking about a parent and the child that you're talking about romantic relationship or you're talking about government power changes that vulnerability. At least it's perception, if not an actual reality.

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Tom Baker: So if I'm hearing I'm hearing, you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying that in order for us to have a public conversation about trust in the police.

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Tom Baker: That we need to address the fact that there's this power discrepancy and that is making it at the moment, impossible to have this conversation because it would first require people in our society to be to be willing to be vault be vulnerable and

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Tom Baker: That's happened right now is, am I right, and hearing you right

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Joseph Hamm: You are the, the part of it. And then I was really focused on that Facebook post is kind of the so what that is, where do you go with that.

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Joseph Hamm: It's the the piece that I would add completely agree with what you just said please the piece that I've added to it is that

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Joseph Hamm: If you want to have a conversation with someone about how you start to help them be willing to accept vulnerability to you.

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Joseph Hamm: You can need to start from the basis of something that makes that makes sense. And I don't think that is the right answer for people to ask the public to trust the police and the police report.

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Joseph Hamm: I think if you're in a context where you are constantly experiencing harm if you're in a context where there's constant injury perceived or real, and I think it's pretty fairly simple. A lot of this is very real. I don't want to make. I'm not. I don't mean to make that argument.

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Joseph Hamm: When you're talking about a situation where people, there's no question. There's no uncertainty in their mind they're there is a problem here that has to be fixed.

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Joseph Hamm: And I think there's a there's a large, there's a lot of volume behind the argument that the few bad apples arguments just isn't good enough anymore.

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Joseph Hamm: Right.

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Joseph Hamm: You can make the argument that you know most of the time you get this right. But when it's wrong. It's wrong.

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Joseph Hamm: It's wrong in really needing more serious work in a more serious attempt to fix something that I think has necessarily happened in the past. And until that platforms built

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Joseph Hamm: I don't know why I don't know what you, what you see what a member of the public when you're trying to get them to trust.

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Joseph Hamm: I mean, how do you, how do you ensure that conversations and recognize my power. I recognize that position. Recognize that I can do more to hurt you.

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Joseph Hamm: But you should be okay with that potential for me to hurt you with everything sitting right behind you in that moment, you have to clean that up. First you have to figure out

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Joseph Hamm: You have to make real you to make a real effort to not for your sin successfully make changes that make that baseline different before really makes any sense to

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Joseph Hamm: If you'll indulge me one of the places is this idea kind of

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Joseph Hamm: Clicked for me. I guess in my own thinking about trustees, when I was doing work in Flint. So during work in Flint after the water crisis and

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Joseph Hamm: All we really wanted to do and that was the understanding community experience there wasn't this

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Joseph Hamm: We try really hard not to bring this, you know, academic, here's what's going on. Here's what should happen. Here's our theories, you want to test us, we will not understand. One of the first projects that I've never been involved in

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Joseph Hamm: That really just wanted to understand that phenomenon and wanted to understand it from the perspective of trust. And one of the things that from my own development, both as a researcher and as a human.

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Joseph Hamm: Was so impactful for me was recognizing that the whole time during the entire during the time of water hot water crisis, people kept talking about how this is a crisis of trust and

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Joseph Hamm: It was not the conversation was not as often, that this is a crisis of water that mean until you that water was fit until that one safe until that that threaten that harm and that that injury was gone.

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Joseph Hamm: Talking about trust, just it betrayed the injury that people are experiencing ignored boundary that they're experiencing.

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Joseph Hamm: You can fix that first and power. I think plays into it, just like you were saying that that was my response better though.

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Tom Baker: No, I agree. I think it's and if you're involved in a it's bring it back to like an interpersonal level because that's when I, when I think about trust. That's for me as a human being. It's the most natural environment.

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Tom Baker: For me to understand it and like, because that's a, it's a complex idea, but I can understand it on an individual level and

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Tom Baker: It makes sense to me that if I'm in a relationship and interpersonal relationship with a person another person and they were to consistently hurt me.

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Tom Baker: And over and over again. And then I was asked that we need that they said, I'm sorry. We need to build trust that I at a certain point would say

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Tom Baker: Well, I love you and I want to trust you. But before I do that, you need to change. You need to do you need to go away and fix yourself before you can come to me and asked me to trust you because

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Tom Baker: I'm consistently making myself vulnerable and you keep hurting me. And so I think about a population huge population when you scale it up it's it's really the same. It's just a bunch of individual experiences mashed together. Yeah.

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Joseph Hamm: There are people who would disagree with me on this.

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Joseph Hamm: But I do think that trust itself is not a different phenomenon, depending on who's involved in it.

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Joseph Hamm: The different elements of it that matter. But I do think it's completely appropriate to talk about

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Joseph Hamm: Your experience of trust in an inner personal relationship and think about what it means to ask for someone's trust and interpersonal relationship.

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Joseph Hamm: And then scale it to law enforcement, I think you're absolutely right that what you're talking about is a bunch of individuals doing very natural human assessments evaluating these relationships in light of the uncertainty that they have about what happens next.

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Joseph Hamm: And just applying that same money they're looking at different things. Obviously, you're not looking for a romantic partners ability will correctly. Use a fiber, like you're looking at different

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Tom Baker: Things. Sure.

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Joseph Hamm: But you're making similar assessments.

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Tom Baker: They're different different toolkits but it's the, the same sort of underlying fun like the fundamental dynamics are very similar and

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Joseph Hamm: The argument wanted me for sure.

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Tom Baker: Yeah, and I think, and I think it's, it makes. Like I said, it just to me as a human being. It's intuitive, like, you know, that's the best for me the best theory is what I hear it, and I'm like, No one said that before, because that's

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Tom Baker: That's obvious.

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Tom Baker: And I think that it's important to with policing to take it down to an individual level, because I think one of the problems that I've that I've identified with policing is that the institution.

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Tom Baker: It humanizes so when you're when you're a police officer your as time goes by the individuals and I noticed this while working and through my observations as a scholar as time goes by.

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Tom Baker: Officers turn human beings into work product like there there's someone and I noticed myself still saying the words like I would deal with this person, or I would deal with this group of people. I didn't deal with that I wasn't, I wasn't interacting, or I saw often was but the being institutionalized.

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Tom Baker: As a police officer, you go through a process where you turn people into work product that you manage and

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Tom Baker: Go through. So I think it's important that when we talk about trust. We talked about re conceiving how we what we think of what it means the police in this country, we need to bring it down to an individual level and treat people like human beings first

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Tom Baker: So that's another thing I appreciate about thinking about a lower level. So, what, what, and I know this is like not an easy question. I don't know if it's even a fair question.

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Tom Baker: But if if we want to make change in this in this app this institution before we really addressed trust. Can you tell me like

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Tom Baker: For someone who's confused about where to go next. What do you think we should do, like, what do you think, should we should do what some tangible sort of things we can do.

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Joseph Hamm: So what I can't do is tell you what the tactics are the policies where the funding strategies that apply the law enforcement that makes sense are

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Joseph Hamm: I just don't know. I don't study policing. I study the way the policing impacts people of my expertise is not in that that institution itself.

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Joseph Hamm: And on the flip side of that, what I have not done it sat down with people who are who are part of this protest, people who are part of these

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Joseph Hamm: Missing moment in the public's reaction. So to law enforcement.

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Joseph Hamm: Have not sat down with the civil groups have not sat down these people with these with these interest to be able to understand what it is specifically that they're demanding.

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Joseph Hamm: And so my answer is probably going to be a little bit disappointing but what I can offer is that if you want to ask someone to trust you. You have to understand their potential for harm and it has to be from their perspective so often what I feel like I hear

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Joseph Hamm: This is happily less true right now is more true, I think, in the aftermath of Ferguson and so much of what I heard was this conversation of, you know,

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Joseph Hamm: I don't understand why they think we're also bad. I don't understand why we aren't we don't really need to do a lot of changes, we don't really need to make systemic change to law enforcement.

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Joseph Hamm: Because what's happening is that their misunderstanding, who we are and all we need to do is get them to see it our way. And they'll recognize that this vulnerability that they're not comfortable with is just a misunderstanding.

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Joseph Hamm: You cannot start there. You can't start from this understanding that the way that someone feels vulnerable to you.

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Joseph Hamm: Is incorrect and needs to be re recalibrated so that then you can tell them why they should trust you get has to be about what they think and what they feel and what they believe.

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Joseph Hamm: And that creates a really difficult situation for law enforcement that is part of why I'm putting on the question of how you reform it

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Tom Baker: I don't think this is a punt at all. Continue, please.

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Joseph Hamm: I appreciate it. I was hoping I could give you something that was a real answer for this.

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Tom Baker: I think this is a real, this is a real answer. Go ahead.

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Joseph Hamm: No, no, no. So

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Joseph Hamm: I, I think that there are police agencies that are doing things in ways that makes sense. And that do address that do objectives we address people's vulnerabilities and

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Joseph Hamm: There are agencies that have Publix that look at them and don't see that. And the problem there is not the public is wrong. The problem there is half of the public needs to be educated

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Joseph Hamm: In there been years of all of the criminal justice system, trying to build trust simply by presenting information, simply by saying here's who we are. Here's what we do is how we do it. Now you trust us. Right, thank

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Joseph Hamm: You. It doesn't. It isn't to say that no one in in these criminal justice organizations is doing things right, it's always that the public is factually accurate but

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Joseph Hamm: The conversation about building trust has to be about addressing the vulnerability in the minds of people who are trusting. It's their perspective, it's their experience, their willingness, it can't be super imposed on them. Right, so

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Tom Baker: It may not matter. The

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Tom Baker: Relying on so it can't be police department, saying, well, the statistics tell us this. So you need to really adjust the way you think it needs to be more saying, you know, it doesn't really matter what that does. What matters is that

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Tom Baker: how people feel about

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Tom Baker: This

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Joseph Hamm: Listening. We're attending to this we and the present that information from law enforcement shouldn't be tailored to those vulnerabilities.

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Joseph Hamm: Right should be that we hear what you're saying. And let me show you what it is we're doing that's addressing that. And this is part of the reason why I don't think that this conversation is one of trust because

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Joseph Hamm: What that leads you to is a conversation that leads you to is you say you're really worried about this particular type of injury as law enforcement. I'm telling you, this is what we're doing to fix that.

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Joseph Hamm: You trust me right you believe that that's okay you believe that's going to change things.

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Joseph Hamm: You can't have that conversation with someone in the context of constantly hurting them. So the reform has to happen first. But once there is that meaningful real reform happening.

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Joseph Hamm: The steps towards building trust are listening and listening specifically to that potential for harm that people feel from their perspective and then getting into that and addressing that.

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Okay.

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Tom Baker: I, I appreciate it. So I'm going to do something really might be a little awkward, but now I'm going to ask you questions about watch

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Tom Baker: So I. So we had this had this long conversation about why we're not ready to talk about trust, which I agree with, but now I'm going to ask you about trust, and I

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Tom Baker: Think it's important because our inability to create an environment where we can begin the process of talking about trust.

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Tom Baker: That we still need to recognize that we need to get there because it is it is important and I just wanted if you could just a little bit. Talk about

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Tom Baker: Why we need to make these changes so that we can make people feel vulnerable, so that we can begin the process of building trust.

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Tom Baker: And by building trust of so for a police, so I don't even know if it will be called the police department. When this happens, but for a social control organization that utilizes the threat of

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Tom Baker: Course, a force to compel you know

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Tom Baker: For whatever that looks like, why is it important, when that power discrepancy exists and that vulnerability exists, why is it important for police agencies to have public trust.

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Joseph Hamm: Starting really broad

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Joseph Hamm: Reason why trust is needed for a society is because we can't predict the others. And so anytime two individuals are going to interact. The the

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Joseph Hamm: The call it the social lubricant that allows that interaction that allows for there to be an efficient exchange of interaction between those two people.

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Joseph Hamm: Is that they are if they're willing to accept that the reality that the other person can make a decision that could could hurt them.

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Joseph Hamm: That if you don't have that people tend to not wants to interact. People tend to try not to interact. People tend to take less chances. They tend to take less risk.

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Joseph Hamm: They tend to want more oversight. They tend to want more more things to step into that relationship that really make it less efficient and make it less functioning.

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Joseph Hamm: And so there are social theory. Some of the social theory argues that a functioning society can only really exist when there's this this ability to get past the what makes things predictable. What makes things obvious what makes things everything

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Joseph Hamm: We move past the point in history. We're all part of the same tribe. And so the behavior of someone else who around you. It requires some level of trust for you to be able to to interact with them without all these other pressures.

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Joseph Hamm: scale it up to the police if there is a police force or there is a institution of social control its goal is typically to be that additional more powerful thing that helps direct the behavior of others we interact with and so

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Joseph Hamm: Sharing your not knowing what this looks like. On the other hand, I have no idea what this thing looks like. But if this is something that is empowered. It's something that has more potential to hurt.

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Joseph Hamm: And so it becomes more important that this thing is trusted in order for there to be any kind of efficient operation.

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Joseph Hamm: The flip side of this though is that there there is at least an argument that the need to trust these kinds of organizations creates the psychological need

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Joseph Hamm: Most people, there's an argument that most people want to be able to trust government, there's an argument that most people want to be able to trust the things that

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Joseph Hamm: That are supposed to protect them and that that's kind of the default setting for us because it is psychologically positive for us to be able to wake up in the morning and say, I trust these things. I feel comfortable. The fact that something could happen.

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Joseph Hamm: And so there is built for the efficiency of law enforcement side of it. But there's also the psychological needs that people have for the things that are around them that could hurt them to be things that they can feel some level of trust in

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Joseph Hamm: And so to have a functioning society, you need some level of trust to have a function of government that need some level of that difference and to have a functioning human raining, to have the ability to trust the things that are supposed to protect them.

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Tom Baker: And just, I know just for myself like I've lost a considerable amount of trust in government.

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Tom Baker: Over the years, these

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Tom Baker: past years, and I can feel the the anxiety that that that induces

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Tom Baker: It does and and like this sense that I had growing up that there was this

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Tom Baker: The sets the set of institutions that were functioning and that some sort of basic level, push come to shove that I could rely on them in some way to be fair arbiters of my future. And I could rely on them to

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Tom Baker: Rely on the rule of law to, I don't know what it was when I had this sense of security and then now having been on the other side of being an agent of social control and learning more about it and experiencing what I'm learning more about what America really is.

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Tom Baker: Yeah, I've lost. I've lost a considerable amount of that and and I'm in a very privileged position. So like my spouse as a as a assistant professor at the University of medical care. I have a house to live in. I have people don't give me a problem when I walk down the street people you

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Tom Baker: Know like I have a pretty easy go of it.

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Tom Baker: So I can't imagine if you were a person who is targeted by society and state in an adversarial way that it would be extremely anxiety, it would be a huge anxiety and unhealthy thing.

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Joseph Hamm: Could be. Yeah, for sure.

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Tom Baker: And I, and I know it trickles down into the poet. Can I don't know. I mean, I can talk to that. I mean, just

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Tom Baker: On a functional level. If you I've been an investigator. So I've investigated homicides I've investigated, you know, burglaries robberies, a whole bunch of different types of crimes and I also policing scholar and I know that if any type of successful criminal investigation.

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Tom Baker: If someone to murder somebody you need is you need

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Tom Baker: Victims you need friends and family of the victims to be willing to interview you to be. I'm sorry to be willing to be interviewed and to give you information.

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Tom Baker: And cooperate and go to trial.

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Tom Baker: And testify and take out all of these burdens. It's really a community effort to

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Tom Baker: Us fully prosecuting offender and the criminal justice system and it cannot happen without and I am sorry to go off on a tangent I've

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Joseph Hamm: Mentioned this

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Tom Baker: But I've like I had a very sort of traumatic experience with this where I was involved in an officer involved shooting. I was attacked by a person and I was

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Tom Baker: positioned between the victim of the domestic the domestic violence call and assess back and end up having to shoot the person who was attacking us and

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Tom Baker: A person died. And when I was being interviewed by the homicide detectives the victim had fled. And the reason they had fled was because they were scared Sheriff Joe Arpaio is going to deport them even though they were there is a victim and not an offender.

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Tom Baker: They were eventually they were found, and gave a gave a statement and you know corroborated my account of what happened.

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Tom Baker: But just think that like even police are vulnerable because of this lack of trust within the community doesn't trust you. It puts it could put you at and I had a lot officers, you're listening this. That's why I'm saying this, it puts you

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Tom Baker: At risk well

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Joseph Hamm: No, it definitely does.

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Joseph Hamm: That interest is a two way street, there is both sides of it.

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Joseph Hamm: Every time people talk about dresses materials here he's getting nervous that the power differential gets lost in that conversation where we're just as vulnerable as you are.

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Joseph Hamm: gnosis verticals. We are a big

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Joseph Hamm: I do completely agree that it is always to a is always both sides can make decisions that can hurt the other side.

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Tom Baker: Right, and it's not. And obviously, they're not they're not equal sides of the they're not at all. I didn't mean to equate the minute

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Joseph Hamm: I just

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Joseph Hamm: But that does happen. I do here, I do hear that and I noticed that as a major response that's bothered me from a lot of my officer friends is

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Tom Baker: Is that, is that they'll say, Yeah, but now we're now us now this but in that's not really productive.

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Tom Baker: When there's said this power.

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Tom Baker: Discrepancy plan.

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Joseph Hamm: Okay, great.

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Um,

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Tom Baker: Yeah, you know,

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Tom Baker: And I'm going to talk a little bit about it. So some of the stuff you've you've written and I'm going to put your Twitter link down below, and as well as a link to the paper that I'm going to mention here.

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Tom Baker: Questions about

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Tom Baker: Where we've got a little longer than I had expected already. So if you run at a time, just let me know I

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Joseph Hamm: Get you so far.

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Tom Baker: Oh yeah. Okay, good. So you talked a little bit about in the paper about aggressive tactics backfire can backfire in these types of relationships.

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Tom Baker: So can you talk a little bit about how like the, the things that are happening right now. How this how this aggressive sort of response manda backfiring the goals that agencies claim they have

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Yeah.

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Joseph Hamm: So I want to be careful. My response to this because there are people far, far better suited than I am to speak to whether to actually be deployed and winter yes you deploy.

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Joseph Hamm: And there is there is a balancing act to be held, I, I personally am of the precision that a lot of more aggressive stuff that's happening with the protests in the arguments, he's being riots, I

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Joseph Hamm: I, I personally think that they're a little over the responses, a little bit over the top that I wanted to be clear that that is not my area of expertise and I would defer someone like Eduardo depart for someone else. Oh, and West is doing some of this conversation on Twitter, in particular.

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Joseph Hamm: They're in a far better place to tell you what is too aggressive and not aggressive but what I do think I can say what I tried to say that paper. What we tried to say in that paper.

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Joseph Hamm: Was that

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Joseph Hamm: To make the argument that law enforcement can exists purely coercive Lee that social control can exist purely coercive Lee.

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Joseph Hamm: Has the potential of making people far more worried about their potential for harm. And so if it's incredibly salient. The people that

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Joseph Hamm: Matters is potential for injury, even in that injury is is use appropriate so I mean obviously if people are constantly being wrongly harmed, you

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Joseph Hamm: Deep, and I can't get back to trust face even when they're being rightly current you're creating this you're creating a dynamic but history seems to suggest pretty strongly doesn't work super well even in the short term. It's not incredibly effective, but definitely not long term.

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Tom Baker: Yeah. And, and, again, I'm like, on an individual. I always found that, you know, having a good conversation with someone and explaining

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Tom Baker: I would. I would. I was not always good. I mean, I was when I look back on who some of the things I've done inside and obviously I've made mistakes. But what I found was

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Tom Baker: What I'm more proud of doing and found more effective as a police officer was when you explain to somebody, the process that they're going through, and the justification for why

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Tom Baker: What's happening is happening if you say, you know, hey, man, I know you're upset. I know you ran from the car and you know I had to tackle yeah and

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Tom Baker: Cups, and that sucks. And I'm gonna treat you fairly now I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to get you some water. I'm going to you know make sure you take care of

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Tom Baker: And here's why. Here's what I'm charging you with here's why I'm charging you with it.

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Tom Baker: Here's what you can expect in the in the future and and if I don't you let me know if I don't follow through on that. I'll make sure that I do. It's far more effective than coercion.

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Tom Baker: Because coercion you be able to explain the psychological processes and for better than I could possibly, but it just, it just puts up a wall between two people. It makes it doesn't it doesn't lend itself to conversation or cooperation.

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Joseph Hamm: Now so i and i think that that is me. I don't know about anyone else's life that is so clear in my own life, but

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Joseph Hamm: Like where someone talks to me the more willing I'm taught me more willing and we're talking to turn them or someone is shutting you down and moving in position, me and like you're saying earlier, dealing with me.

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Joseph Hamm: Absolutely. The more that that's my action. I feel differently.

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Tom Baker: No one likes to be managed or dealt with that work.

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Tom Baker: Like you don't like to be met. You know, you want to be.

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Tom Baker: You know, allowed to be a part of the process and express yourself and know what's next and be me foreign about what the processes are that control your life and

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Tom Baker: Just because somebody stole something or, you know, got in a fight, doesn't mean that they don't still feel the same way about their future. Maybe they feel more so because they're in this extra vulnerable sort of position.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah.

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Tom Baker: The powers beings around them. Can you, can you talk a little, a little bit. You talked about like the classic trust and the paper, you talked about this classic trust model. And there's the process based model of policing.

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Tom Baker: Can you talk about these two bottles and destroy them real briefly.

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah, no, no. I totally so the idea for this paper came out of a debate between myself and the second author, I believe, on the paper rich checker. I'm pretty sure

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Joseph Hamm: He and I were arguing which whether you could more get people's compliance with the law via kind of Tyler's classic

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Joseph Hamm: People being treated well makes them feel that greater obligation to obey the court that the police are more legitimate and then that leads to more positive.

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Joseph Hamm: Interactions with law enforcement being kind of a process based model and then this argument in the trust literature that

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Joseph Hamm: The willingness to accept vulnerability comes from

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Joseph Hamm: assessments of the other the trustees ability benevolence and integrity. So ability being their ability to do whatever it is that we're talking about trusting them for their benevolence, meaning that care and a real willingness to put

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Joseph Hamm: The interests of the other the trust the trust or above their own and integrity adhering to a moral code.

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Joseph Hamm: And then the personality of the trust or those kind of come together to predict that willingness to be vulnerable, which then goes on to predict risk taking in relationship, the argument there being that most

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Joseph Hamm: Most interactions between

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Joseph Hamm: A genetic are people who can make their own decisions so gently individuals are

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Joseph Hamm: People who make deliberate decisions require some level of risk. And so if you're going to get to that that risk taking a relationship you need that willingness to be vulnerable.

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Joseph Hamm: So basically, I've been putting together a book chapter that Rick and I were working on before this article we argued about who was right about

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Joseph Hamm: better predict the important outcomes for law enforcement. And so we thought we tried study that just pitted against each other. That period kind of classic tiring process based model with this.

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Joseph Hamm: It's a Roger Maris the name. It's usually past she talked about the classic model but pitted against each other and see. Which one's a better predictor

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Joseph Hamm: Then it turns out it's a both and answer, which was obviously incredibly disappointing because I was right.

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Tom Baker: Well, you weren't wrong so that's

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Tom Baker: Right, yeah. So, so you had these two these two bottles and you decided to like test to see which one was right and then you discover that it's it's both, but

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Tom Baker: Maybe we can back up a little bit. What did you. So how did you briefly just for first and maybe put it in terms of someone who's maybe not taken methods class and graduate school, what

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Tom Baker: Like, what were your methods like how did you go about testing that that question and

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Tom Baker: If you could you just tell us, basically, how did you test the question.

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Joseph Hamm: Sure, sure. So he was serving. What we did was we asked people to complete a survey that had a bunch of questions about things that they believe are things that they agreed or disagreed with about themselves in light of law enforcement or about law enforcement.

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Joseph Hamm: So we were asking questions like, in general, do the police treat people fairly Rick has a has a section of procedural fairness kinds of questions that ask about, you know, are these people are they

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Joseph Hamm: Are they beyond the boundaries are they going beyond the boundaries of law when they're interacting with you for asking questions like, do you think the police have ability. Do you think the police care about you. They have integrity.

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Joseph Hamm: And then we asked kind of that traditional legitimacy type normative alignment kind of questions do they share your values to represent the community or do you feel obligated to obey them.

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Joseph Hamm: And then that trust questions really uncomfortable. Are you willing to accept the potential that they could make decisions that can impact you.

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Joseph Hamm: And this is where it probably gets less interesting for someone who hasn't taken a methods class. But basically what we wanted to understand is how that stuff works or how those how some of those attitudes.

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Joseph Hamm: Move with other attitudes. When people say they're more likely to to believe that the police are procedurally fair

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Joseph Hamm: Or they also more likely to say the police have more ability and what we were doing. We were trying to super impose on that, Nessa relationships across these items are these skills.

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Joseph Hamm: Was some kind of order with some kind of this and then this and then this and then there's kind of a process to it.

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Joseph Hamm: And it was in trying to figure out how these things are different or how they're the same.

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Joseph Hamm: Do we have two different concepts are the same concept in the end in trying to sort through all of that. That's really where we got towards this this integrated framework that ends up being a contribution at paper.

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Joseph Hamm: Was kind of finding that, you know, even though this was a part of the process model that kind of fits. Part of this is classic model.

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Joseph Hamm: Right, really, there's not a big difference between

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Joseph Hamm: The one in particular that mattered. And it was kind of the pivot point for that paper.

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Joseph Hamm: Was a normative alignment and this idea of trustworthiness are really different things to say that the police share my values and have ability and have the Netherlands and have integrity.

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Joseph Hamm: Statistically, that's not a different thing. They're all at all kind of the same assessment and once you take those two are kind of daisy chains and type in the middle, you start seeing what looks more like more uniform processes of how people get from one to the game against the yet.

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Tom Baker: So you got so you got these two proposals for how it could how things could work. And you're like, Okay, I'm right. I know this is this

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah.

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Tom Baker: You put them together. And so often happens with the social sciences, you realize that it's just a lot more

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Tom Baker: Complicated and they're, they're not necessarily that different, and it's it's a process of sort of mashing them together and then reorganizing it to make to make a retreat this sort of new framework like this integrated framework we integrate the two

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah.

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Tom Baker: Two theories, can you can you sort of maybe just briefly just walk us through

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Tom Baker: That what what you

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Tom Baker: Are yeah the new further

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Tom Baker: What it looks like

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Joseph Hamm: Really quickly, I want to throw out

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Joseph Hamm: The academic, the idea that you just throw things. You can see how they come back.

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Tom Baker: I don't know the answer.

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Joseph Hamm: Just for my own stale little one, but to to the to the question.

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Joseph Hamm: Basically, what we did is we took some pretty well understood ideas in psychology that in order for for somebody to get to it to behavior. You really start out with

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Joseph Hamm: With some sort of an assessment, you need some kind of information you need something that you can draw on. And then once you have that information. You make assessments about what that information needs or means you just made it through social cognition.

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Joseph Hamm: And social psychology

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Joseph Hamm: That you make attributions about the person we actually she's about her relationship and that relate that those attributions change how you feel when you believe and then that's what ultimately decides how you behave with this other person.

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Joseph Hamm: So making that more concrete in the context of policing, like we tried to do with this model.

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Joseph Hamm: Basically what we argue is that

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Joseph Hamm: To understand the legitimacy of the police, you start with the information that people have about what policing is about how it behaves

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Joseph Hamm: And we talked about those in terms of interactions that we do mean that these can be vicarious interactions, so someone can can pull information about what policing is a means to be enforcing them from how they're interacting with them.

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Joseph Hamm: You started with those evaluations of the interaction with law enforcement. And from that, you start to attribute things about the police. And so if you believe the police treat people fairly

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Joseph Hamm: You're going to start to make more cognitive assessments of who the police are, what their characteristics are what they believe what they are out.

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Joseph Hamm: And the more positive those evaluations, you make a law enforcement are, the more you start to feel

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Joseph Hamm: differently about them, you start to feel more positive, you start to feel more confident you starting to feel more satisfied and because it's means trust.

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Joseph Hamm: We focus really heavily on people's feelings that willingness to accept vulnerability and kind of use that as a core construct for that part of that stage of the frame.

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Joseph Hamm: And then once you've gotten to the point where someone's feeling I feel, I feel like feel satisfied that feeling of psychological internalization

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Joseph Hamm: Facility behaviors. And so when someone is facing situation they have to decide how to interact with law enforcement, they are drawing from how they feel and what they've internalized what they believe about themselves in relationship to law enforcement.

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Joseph Hamm: And this is kind of four stages that we aren't you

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Tom Baker: So in the end, it sort of comes down to this sort of you're bringing the psychological component and putting it in the forefront and it does it reality. The reality that matters is the individual that's interacting with the police.

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Joseph Hamm: And is definitely the psychologist in me. But yeah, no, I don't ever get very far from that.

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Joseph Hamm: That perception is reality for the individual

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Tom Baker: And that's what. So I think, important for police officers to engage the sociological imagination and be able to develop the skill set to put themselves in the

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Tom Baker: In the position of the person they're dealing with and think how and be able to make an educated guess as to how they may be interpreting it

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Tom Baker: Because it's the reality of the person that you're interacting with not dealing with interacting with and their reality is what what really matters like

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Tom Baker: Their perspective is what really matters. You, you, you also

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Tom Baker: Right, right. It's what really and and as and because we're in this is a police officer, you're in this this power differential. It's not an equal

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Tom Baker: Interaction, so it makes sense to me to like to say well you with your with one of the things I learned in the military was that when you're in charge of somebody that you have responsibility for them so

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Tom Baker: You go out to the field.

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Tom Baker: For three days and you're a private and you've got a corporal

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Tom Baker: And that corporals in charge of you, then it's the corporate responsibility to make sure that you have food that you have water that you have

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Tom Baker: You know, the things you need to be healthy and that you're taking care of including your psychological well being responsible for you because they have power over you.

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Tom Baker: Yeah. When you're a police officer, you have power you have power over this person you need to you need to. I think you need to recognize that they're vulnerable that you're an opposite you have control over them and you need to manage take care of their welfare, it's important

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Tom Baker: You talk about also that, so this is this is this, this, this makes this makes sense, but that there needs to be further development that you need to develop this idea more can you talk about maybe some of the weaknesses are some of the things that need to be parsed out

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Joseph Hamm: Yeah no absolutely um

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Joseph Hamm: So,

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Joseph Hamm: And I'm trying to think of a way to put this that is less little as a head.

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Joseph Hamm: We don't because we, there's nothing about the way that we collected this data that would let us convincingly argue that how people evaluate the police is causing

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Joseph Hamm: How they internalize things about the police, which is causing their behavior. There's absolutely the possibility that

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Joseph Hamm: People don't feel like they have an option in terms of how they interact with law enforcement.

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Joseph Hamm: And so their behavior is actually being driven by something outside of themselves entirely

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Joseph Hamm: And in order to to kind of deal with what you make what we usually call cognitive dissonance, or this this mismatch between your behaviors and your attitudes.

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Joseph Hamm: People have a more positive evaluation of law enforcement, because they feel constrained and having to have a more positive reaction.

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Joseph Hamm: There's nothing about this paper that are the data that we collected of the way that we tested it, that would allow us to convincingly say this is the process and in fact in the paper.

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Joseph Hamm: You try to be really explicit about the fact that for some individuals, they're going to move in different ways through this process.

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Joseph Hamm: But what we were hoping we could offer to the literature is a way to organize this mess of literature that's trying to understand legitimacy that you're everyone's got their own contracts, new ideas.

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Joseph Hamm: definitions for this constructs know orders and how they they bring all those pieces together. We wanted to create a structure framework.

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Joseph Hamm: For how people can can think about those items, recognizing that there's work left to be done on the console side of this. There's a great paper by Lewis to enable Megan and Kelly tell it where they kind of take that literature to task.

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Joseph Hamm: In its, its console questions and its ability to actually test cause across procedural fairness to the positive behavior reaction reactions to things like that. So for those who are interested, I highly recommend that paper, but

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Tom Baker: I'll put a link in the description as well.

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Joseph Hamm: It's not, it's good. I appreciate that.

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Joseph Hamm: I highly recommend for those who are interested in that extra question that is what we offer the literature is an organizing framework less than a cost model and it would be nice to be able to turn that framework into a Cosmo. Okay. And, you know, it's a bit of a nerdy answer here.

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Tom Baker: No, no, don't worry, don't worry. There's a lot of nerds on here to that are kicking out right now.

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Tom Baker: Any questions.

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Tom Baker: So I don't take too much your time. I just a couple more questions.

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Tom Baker: So I always ask this question. And again, I'm like, I don't know if I should ask you, but I, I have to ask it.

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Tom Baker: to reshape it a little bit. I always like to ask what what does this mean in terms of policy. So, what, what can what can what can what you've discovered sort of be pushed out to do to push out and impact the world.

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Tom Baker: I'm going to rephrase it and say it. Are you at a point now we're in your understanding of trust and I'm interested in policing.

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Tom Baker: As well. Is there anything you can suggest, is there anything that you feel strongly about a confident saying like, this is these are some policies that we can we can we should seriously consider

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Tom Baker: I'm sorry to put you on the spot.

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Joseph Hamm: No, no, no, it's a it's a totally fair question. And what I'm I have an answer, I'm trying to decide if I feel confident enough to say that I'm 100% behind it. It seems like a no brainer to me that there has to be opportunity for conversation between

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Joseph Hamm: Really any governmental agency and the public, it's it's responsible for. But I think, in particular between law enforcement and the public, where I hesitate, is that I don't think the answer to

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Joseph Hamm: This current moment in that relationship is a bunch of town halls, but that is not going to fix this problem at all.

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Joseph Hamm: But as a matter of policy to have an opportunity for the public to be heard, I think, is a no brainer for building trust.

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Joseph Hamm: And that trying to understand how people think about the vulnerability and how people think about their potential for harm how people think about the police in relation to that potential from our

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Joseph Hamm: If you don't have an avenue for thinking about that. I think you have a pretty significant problem.

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Joseph Hamm: I do think that the people who need to answer the questions I have is it okay to tear gas at this moment versus that moment I

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Joseph Hamm: Think that that is a more technical question and that is I think a more police reform focused question and I think that there

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Joseph Hamm: I myself would not feel super confident weighing in on. But if that conversation happens in the absence of understanding of what people are worried about it, think about our care about

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Joseph Hamm: You creating a problem for yourself. And I think that's pretty much going to be true across contacts. I'm okay stamping it and saying, that means for real.

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Tom Baker: I think that's

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Joseph Hamm: Very reasonable how wow that I don't think that one can backfire to

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Tom Baker: Know, and I don't think ever giving opportunities for people to voice their, their concerns and play a role in shaping the future of the institution.

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Tom Baker: I don't think I don't see how that can

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Tom Baker: backfire. I think injecting them a democracy more democracy. Now just seems like a good idea to to be

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Joseph Hamm: It's definitely being asked for and the fact that it's being asked for alone makes it worth paying attention to.

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Tom Baker: Yeah. And if we're scared of more democracy, then we have some very big problems, I think, and we are, I think that that's

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Joseph Hamm: You're not wrong at all. Yeah.

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Tom Baker: I think there are a lot of people in this country who are terrified by the idea of allowing the wretched of the Earth to control the future of this country.

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Tom Baker: It's a, it's an old. I think we look at our institutions, they were structured in a way to ensure that certain people did not have a say in shaping things and

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Tom Baker: It's ironic that the solution to saving the social control mechanism may be allowing the voices of the people that it was designed to control

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Tom Baker: I don't know. It's sort of

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Tom Baker: Gets my head spinning in a million different ways can I, can I just let before I let you go. Last question.

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Tom Baker: I just want to, I want to do is just sort of turn it over to you and give you a chance to have sort of any parting thoughts, where we are now, as a society,

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Tom Baker: What you, if you, for people who are listening to this. What would, what would you like to say if anything you've already said a ton that I appreciate it. But I want to give you the last word.

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Joseph Hamm: I appreciate it. I'm

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Joseph Hamm: on a professional level I think we've kind of covered, but I think I can offer and that is this

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Joseph Hamm: There's a house that has to be put in order before it makes any sense to walk. Someone through it and say, here's what you should think or what you should believe about this. There are there are real problems.

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Joseph Hamm: And I understand the the pushback of the few bad apples that there are great people doing great things out there, but I think it would be hard in this moment to miss that it isn't good enough anymore but

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Joseph Hamm: Sure it's only a few people doing really terrible things, but it's a few people doing really terrible things and that's a problem and that needs to be addressed that.

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Joseph Hamm: So to the extent that I am speaking to your audience and inserting myself and kind of a last word taking that seriously. I think critical

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Joseph Hamm: And I am not in a position to tell anyone what that means, but really trying to understand that this has to be this, it has to be better than what it is, there is

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Joseph Hamm: There's no other. I can't help you if you can't get to the point where this is a better thing. None of the work that I'm doing, trying to understand trust in the

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Joseph Hamm: Regions of the PowerPoints of the presentation. And this is going to help you if those real issues are seriously dealt with and the impact is different, just to say that I sent another 40 officer student implicit bias training is not an outcome and even yeah I

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Joseph Hamm: Saw stop there, but real changes.

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Joseph Hamm: I

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Tom Baker: Don't think you could have said it any better.

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Tom Baker: And

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Tom Baker: I will leave it there. I just again want to thank you. I know this is like stressful time for everybody. I really appreciate everyone listening. Really appreciate it. Appreciate your time. Good luck with

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Tom Baker: Your endeavors. And thank you again.

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Joseph Hamm: Thank you for the invitation. All these conversations