The impact of police social capital on officer performance of community policing

Social capital is used as a theoretical framework to reveal the importance of relationships between officers and their supervisors for performing community policing. It is expected that officers with higher levels of social capital will accomplish more community policing than their peers who have lesser amounts of trust, cooperation, group cohesion, and social support in their work relationships. Using data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, two measures of community policing were developed. Results from negative binomial and zero‐inflated negative binomial regression models did not support the premise that police social capital is related to officer performance of community policing. Instead, officer performance varied significantly according to the department in which the officer worked, whether officers were assigned to be community policing specialists, and their levels of tenure. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of organizational factors that promote or hinder the implementation of community policing.