Can Community Policing Improve Police-Community Relations in a Low-Income Country Setting?

Community-oriented policing (COP) is one of the most widely touted mechanisms for building bridges between police forces and the communities they serve. But evidence on the effectiveness of COP is surprisingly scant. We present results from one of the first randomized controlled trials to evaluate COP in the Global South. The COP initiative we study was locally designed and funded by the Ugandan government. We find no evidence that the program reduced crime, enhanced perceptions of safety, improved attitudes towards the police, or strengthened norms of cooperation with the police. We explore a variety of potential explanations for these results, including both supply-side factors (e.g. resource constraints within the Ugandan police) and demand-side factors (e.g. low baseline trust). We find no evidence that overcoming these obstacles would make COP more effective. Taken together, our findings point to important limitations of COP in low-income countries.