“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: the effects of unanticipated police reform during the COVID-19 pandemic on perceived community willingness to obey the law and cooperate with the police

Abstract

This study explores the effects of the COVID-19-driven reform in reactive activities (i.e. in-person handling of calls, arrests for minor crimes) and proactive activities (i.e. in-person community policing and problem-solving activities) on the perceived community willingness to obey the law and cooperate with the police. We use a 2021 in-person survey of 600 police officers from China and 613 police officers from Taiwan and employ confirmatory factor analysis to estimate the endogenous measures of procedural justice and public compliance and cooperation. We find that, for reactive activities, although reductions in the in-person handling of calls and arrests for minor crimes do not shape perceived levels of procedural justice, they have direct correlations with increased perceived community compliance/cooperation. The indirect effects show that a decrease in the in-person handling of calls has a total, positive effect on cooperation, and this effect is all through improved procedural justice. Meanwhile, a reduction in the number of arrests for minor crimes does not exert a total or indirect effect on cooperation. For proactive activities, a reduction in community policing and problem-solving activities does not influence perceived public compliance/cooperation directly. However, it exerts a positive, both total and indirect, effect on compliance/cooperation.

INTRODUCTION

In spring 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic (World Health Organization [WHO] 2020). Although police agencies might have had emergency plans put in place before the pandemic (Alvarado et al. 2020; Mrozla 2022), they were typically not well prepared for a global critical incident that lasted for three years (Council on Criminal Justice 2020; Lum et al. 2020a; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). Under such dire circumstances, police agencies had to reform their organization and operation and, thus, “innovate” (Hartmann and Hartmann 2020). In the process, the police balanced the protection of their employees’ health with the provision of services to the community (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Alvarado et al. 2020; Jennings and Perez 2020; Lum et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2023; Warren et al. 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a, 2021b; Makin et al. 2023).

Although several studies to date measured the effects of the pandemic and the associated rapid police reform on police officers’ mental health (Bapna et al. 2021; Boovaragasamy et al. 2021; Duxbury and Campeau; Fleming and Brown 2021; Frenkel et al. 2021; Wu et al. 2021; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2023; Liu et al. 2024; Pitts et al. 2021; Silva do Rosário and Löfgren 2021), very few studies tried to put the effects of the pandemic and a rapid police reform in a wider perspective (Maskály et al. 2021a; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). Our study expands the extant literature in three directions.

First, prior studies primarily explored the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and police reform on police officer wellness and rarely focused on the effects on the police-community relationship, the quality, and difficulty of police officer work (Maskály et al. 2021a; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024a, 2024b). In our paper, we examine the effects of such a reform on the perceived community response. Global emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, create uncertainty, panic, and despair, consume resources, and could jeopardize police legitimacy and the police-citizen relationship (Chenane et al. 2023).

Second, prior literature on COVID-19 police reform is, with a few exceptions (Alvarado et al. 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a), mostly based on officer surveys from English-speaking Western democracies (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Lum et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2023; Maskály et al. 2021b; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). This study utilizes the data collected in China and Taiwan. Although Taiwan (officially the Republic of China) is not officially recognized as an independent country by the United Nations, it has been governed independently from the People’s Republic of China since 1949 (Maizland 2024). As a result, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were separately determined by the two governments (Hale et al. 2021).

Third, while the relationship between procedural justice and community cooperation and compliance has been explored in the extant literature (Meško and Tankebe 2014; Bolger and Walters 2019; Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006), its focus has been on the experiences during normal times. The COVID-19 pandemic, characterized with lockdowns, store closures, travel bans, school closures, and other measures issued by governments to curb the spread of COVID-19 (Ritchie et al. 2021; Hale et al. 2021), was anything but business as usual. Our study, grounded in police officer perspectives, contributes to this body of extant literature by exploring the nature of the relationship between procedural justice and perceived community cooperation and compliance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of our study contribute key knowledge that could be used in cases of other emergencies, be they natural or man-made.

This study explores the effects of the COVID-19-driven reform in reactive activities (i.e. in-person handling of calls and arrests for minor crimes) and proactive activities (i.e. in-person community policing and problem-solving activities) on the perceived community willingness to obey the law and cooperate with the police. Because our goal is to explore the effects of the changes in police activities during the COVID-19 pandemic on the perceived community willingness to obey and cooperate with the police, we decided to probe police officers, persons who are in the best position to know how much their work has changed. Thus, we use the 2021 in-person survey of 600 police officers from China and 613 police officers from Taiwan, collected as part of a larger international project “Police Organizational Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” We employ confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to estimate the endogenous measures of procedural justice and public compliance and cooperation, and structural equation modelling (SEM) to assess the relationships between the exogenous, mediating, and outcome variables, along with several control variables indicating officer demographics. We estimate both the direct and indirect effects of reactive and proactive police activity changes on perceived public compliance and cooperation through the underlying mechanism of changed police procedural justice behaviors.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Police reform in reactive and proactive policing during the COVID-19 pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, many governments imposed lockdowns or stay-at-home orders (Sandford 2020), closed schools, issued travel bans, and imposed various other measures aimed at curtailing the spread of COVID-19 (Ritchie et al. 2021; Hale et al. 2021). Consequently, the demand for police services (e.g. calls for service) was affected too. Police administrators from police agencies across the world reported receiving fewer calls for service overall (Alvarado et al. 2020; Lum et al. 2023; Maskály et al. 2021a). Similarly, several studies (Ashby 2020; Bullinger et al. 2021; Paramasivan et al. 2022) documented that the overall number of calls for service declined during the stay-at-home orders, although the effect varied across types of calls, cities, and countries (Ashby 2020; Lersch 2020; Leslie and Wilson 2020; Bullinger et al. 2021; Koziarski 2021; Nix and Richards 2021).

Under such rapidly changing conditions, the police had to reform their organization and operation. While there is extant literature examining changes in the police agencies’ internal organization (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Lum et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2023; Maskály et al. 2021a, 2021b; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b), this paper primarily focuses on the pandemic-lead reform of reactive and proactive police activities.

Reform of reactive policing activities

At the onset of the pandemic, several police agencies (Alvarado et al. 2020; Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023) provided written guidance to their police officers about modifications on how police officers should respond to calls for service. These modifications covered whether police officers should respond in person or use alternative modes of response (e.g. telephone, internet, teleconferencing systems; Makin et al. 2023). Studies from different countries (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Alvarado et al. 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a; Walklate et al. 2022a; Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b) indicate a decline in the number of calls for service answered in person and, in turn, an increase in the number of calls answered remotely. Close to one-half of the U.S. and Canadian police agencies in Lum and colleagues’ study (2023) reported that 20 per cent or more of their calls for service during the pandemic were not answered in person. Similar results were reported in the study of police agencies within the State of Washington by Makin and colleagues (2023).

Extant research also shows that police agencies in Canada and the United States issued guidance on handling arrests (Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023), while this was not the case in some Latin American countries (Alvarado et al. 2020). Regardless of whether the change was policy-driven, studies indicate that the number of arrests, particularly for minor crimes, seemed to decrease during the lockdowns (Maskály et al. 2021a; Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023). While the protection of police officers and suspects was one of the primary reasons for such changes, the willingness of local jails and prisons to take in arrestees also played a prominent role in the police administrators’ decisions (Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b).

The pandemic-related changes included not only whether the arrest was carried out, but also what the booking process looked like in case of an arrest (Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). Reactive police investigations during the pandemic were modified as well (Walklate et al. 2022b; Lum et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). In some police agencies, official guidance was offered to the police detectives on these modifications (Makin et al. 2023), including remote work (Walklate et al. 2022b; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b).

Reform of proactive and community policing activities

At the onset of the pandemic, police agencies from most of the countries surveyed in the Americas (Alvarado et al. 2020; Lum et al. 2023) indicated that they adopted official policies instructing their police officers to reduce or limit their proactive and community policing activities. Indeed, as extant research shows (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Lum et al. 2023; Maskály et al. 2021a, Maskály et al. 2021c), the majority of police agencies participating in the studies indicated reducing or limiting proactive and community policing activities. Maskály and colleagues’ global study (2021a) revealed that in about one-half of the 27 countries included in the study, proactive police activities decreased. However, the pattern of changes was uniform neither across the types of proactive activities nor countries (Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). On the one hand, a global study by Maskály and colleagues (2021a) demonstrated that traffic stops seemed to decrease in some countries, while they remained at the pre-pandemic levels in other countries. Similarly, traffic stops seemed to decrease in the United States (Ashby 2020; Mohler et al. 2020; Demir and Cassino 2024; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). On the other hand, the use of directed patrols increased, and Lum and colleagues (2023) reported an increase in the use of directed patrols by the Canadian and U.S. police agencies in the places in which the public tended to concentrate during the pandemic (e.g. supermarkets, hospitals). Similarly, Alvarado and colleagues (2020) reported an increase of directed patrols in Latin American and the Caribbean countries.

Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic police reform

The bulk of the literature on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic police reform focuses on police officer wellness, particularly mental health (Duxbury and Campeau 2021; Fleming and Brown 2021; Frenkel et al. 2021; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b; Liu et al. 2024; Nameirakpam et al. 2021; Silva do Rosário and Löfgren 2021; Wu et al. 2021). Studies also examined the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on police work and police culture (Fleming and Brown 2021; Li et al. 2021; Maskály et al. 2021c; Gaub et al. 2022; Walklate et al. 2022b; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024a, 2024b). However, prior studies exploring the effect of these police reforms on the police-community relationship are scarce.

In a survey of police administrators from 27 countries, Maskály and colleagues (2021a) discovered that almost no police administrators expected that the COVID-19 police reform would negatively reflect on their relationship with the community. Having in mind the fact that public health emergencies stress the police-citizen relationship (Waseem and Laufs 2020) and the adversarial nature of police-citizen contacts during the pandemic in many countries that resulted in warnings, fines, and arrests (Amnesty International 2020; Human Rights Watch 2021), Maskály and colleagues (2021a) argued that the police administrators’ expectation of no negative effects on the police-community relationship is puzzling. However, in a subsequent study of police officers from seven U.S. police agencies, Maskály and colleagues (2021c) uncovered that, except for one police agency, police officers from all other police agencies expected, as a result of the pandemic-related reform, public confidence in the police, respect for the police, and public safety would all decline. Similarly, in the study of police agencies in the State of Washington (Makin et al. 2023), some of the respondents noted that the police-community relationship was negatively affected by social distancing requirements and other COVID-19 reforms. Police interviewees in the UK study by Charman and colleagues (2023) proposed that, because of their task of COVID-19 enforcement, they were perceived as “villains” and risked damaging the relationship with the public. In addition, they worried about losing public support because of the prioritization of COVID-19 calls and the lack of in-person response to non-COVID-19 calls (Charman et al. 2023).

Because the extant research exploring the police officers’ perceptions of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic police reform on community compliance and cooperation with the police is quite limited, in the development of our hypotheses, we rely on community surveys.

Citizen compliance and cooperation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Normative model of citizen compliance

The normative or process-based model of citizen compliance is grounded on Tyler’s (1990) arguments that the best predictor of people’s willingness to comply with the laws and cooperate and obey the authorities is procedural justice. It consists of four elements: dignity and respect, neutrality, voice, and trustworthy motives (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2003). Extensive research demonstrates the link between procedural justice and citizens’ willingness to comply with the laws and cooperate with the police (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006; Meško and Tankebe 2014; Bolger and Walters 2019). In uncertain times of high discretion, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, some police agencies have purposely emphasized the procedural justice approach in their enforcement of COVID-19 rules (National Police Chief’s Council 2020), while other police agencies might have slipped into their more “traditional” ways of doing things and disregarded the procedurally just approach (Amnesty International 2020; Gurinskaya et al. 2024). Yet, the very limited extant literature confirms that, even in the times of the pandemic, procedural justice is a powerful predictor of citizen compliance with the COVID-19 rules (Murphy et al. 2021; Williamson et al. 2022) and their perceptions of police performance during the pandemic (Ghaemmaghami et al. 2021; Sandrin and Simpson 2022). We hypothesize that police officers who perceive that police officers use procedural justice during the pandemic are also more likely to expect public cooperation.

Instrumental model of citizen compliance

The instrumental or utilitarian model of citizen compliance rests on the idea that people’s compliance and obedience are determined by their evaluations of police performance, the risk of getting caught violating the rules, and judgments about distributive justice (Sunshine and Tyler 2003). Based on the deterrence theory, the fear of sanctions for violations of legal rules could be a factor driving citizens’ compliance with the laws (Tyler 1990; Murphy et al. 2016). While the fear of sanctions for violations of COVID-19 rules and/or the fear of COVID-19 were significant predictors of citizen compliance with COVID-19 rules in several countries (Burruss et al. 2021; Chenene et al. 2023; Gurinskaya et al. 2024; Murphy et al. 2021; Lin et al. 2022; Williamson et al. 2022), they were not in one U.S. study (Van Rooij 2020).

Pre-COVID-19 studies show that evaluations of police effectiveness and perceptions of police legitimacy are closely associated (Tankebe 2008; Bradford and Jackson 2010), as are perceptions of police legitimacy and citizens’ willingness to obey the law and cooperate with the police (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler and Jackson 2014; Murphy et al. 2016; Jackson and Bradford 2019; Jackson et al. 2021). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of crimes was reduced, and the police were less visible (Nouri and Kochel 2022), which could have affected the assessments of police effectiveness and residents’ feeling of safety. Ghaemmaghami et al. (2021) discovered that the citizens were concerned about the police’s lack of response for low-level disorders during the pandemic, signaling a decrease in the perceptions of police effectiveness.

However, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the police effectiveness could be assessed not only on the basis of dealing with crimes in general but also on the basis of how effective the police are perceived to be in protecting the community (and themselves) from getting exposed to the COVID-19 virus during police-citizen interactions. Early in the pandemic, Israeli citizens expected that the enforcement of the COVID-19 emergency regulations should be the primary focus of the police during the pandemic, indicating that such enforcement should not negatively affect the police-community relationship (Perry et al. 2020). Furthermore, the fear of COVID-19 was a strong predictor of citizen compliance with the COVID-19 rules (Chenene et al. 2023; Gurinskaya et al. 2024; McCarthy et al. 2021; Lin et al. 2022). Thus, we can envision that citizens may have perceived positively a reduction in reactive in-person contacts between the police and the citizens, presumably done to protect the health of both citizens and police officers. We hypothesize that police officers who perceive that in-person responses to calls for service are reduced/resulted in fewer arrests for less serious crimes are also more likely to expect compliance from the citizens. We also expect that the relationship between reduced reactive policing activities and public cooperation will be moderated by the police officers’ perceptions of procedural justice.

Experience with the police

Another factor that shapes people’s perceptions of the police and their willingness to obey the laws and cooperate with the police is their direct or vicarious experience with the police. While voluntary, citizen-initiated contacts (e.g. calls for service) could improve police legitimacy, involuntary or police-initiated contacts (e.g. arrests) could decrease it (Skogan 2005; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller 2014; Legewie and Fagan 2019). The results of the U.S. study by Nouri and Kochel (2022) showed that positive encounters with the police during the pandemic were directly related to the residents’ perceptions of policing and safety, while negative encounters were not related to their perceptions of safety.

Community-oriented policing, which includes problem-oriented policing, encourages positive and non-enforcement police-citizen contacts (Skogan 2006; Office of Community Oriented Policing Services 2012). Peyton and colleagues (2019) found that community policing activities, measured as door-to-door non-enforcement community policing visits, significantly improved both police legitimacy among the residents and their willingness to cooperate with the police. During the COVID-19 pandemic, police agencies not only developed official policies advising police officers to reduce or limit their proactive and community policing activities (Alvarado et al. 2020; Lum et al. 2023) but also actively reduced these activities (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a, 2021c; Lum et al. 2023). Unless balanced with extensive virtual community policing activities (Ralph et al. 2022), this reduction of in-person community policing activities could negatively affect police legitimacy and, in turn, public cooperation with the police. We hypothesize that police officers who perceive that the police reduced community policing activities are also more likely to expect less public cooperation. In addition, we also expect that the relationship between reduced community policing activities and public cooperation will be moderated by the police officers’ perceptions of procedural justice.

THE CURRENT STUDY

This study explores the effects of the COVID-19-driven police reform of reactive and proactive activities on the perceived community’s willingness to obey the law and cooperate with the police. We employ CFA to estimate the endogenous measures of procedural justice and public compliance and cooperation, and SEM to assess the relationships between the exogenous, mediating, and outcome variables, along with several control variables indicating officer demographics. We estimate both the direct and indirect effects of reactive and proactive police activity changes on perceived public compliance and cooperation through the underlying mechanism of changed police procedural justice behaviors.

Our study adds to the existing literature along three dimensions. First, extant literature primarily explored the effects of the COVID-19 police reform on police officer wellness, while very few studies assessed the effects on the police perspectives of the quality of police work, difficulty of police officer work, and police-community relationship (Maskály et al. 2021a; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024a, 2024b). We purposely focus on police officers in our study because they are in the best position to assess the extent of the reform (i.e. how much the nature and extent of their work has changed during the pandemic). Hence, our study examines the effects of such an unanticipated police reform on the perceived community response. Second, existing literature exploring the relationship between procedural justice and community compliance and cooperation (Meško and Tankebe 2014; Bolger and Walters 2019; Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006) typically does not take into account unusual times, such as a pandemic. Based on police officer views, we explore this relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, with a few exceptions (Alvarado et al. 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a), extant literature on COVID-19 police reform is almost exclusively based on the English-speaking Western democracies (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Lum et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2023; Maskály et al. 2021b; Makin et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). This study uses the 2021 in-person survey of 600 police officers from China and 613 from Taiwan. Although China and Taiwan are geographically adjacent and encountered the coronavirus only a few weeks apart, their governments responded to the COVID-19 pandemic differently (Fig. 1) (Hale et al. 2021).

Before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic (2020), China was the first country to introduce (stringent) measures to control its spread, called the “Zero-COVID” policy (Yuan 2022), which included lockdown orders, mandatory quarantine, routine testing, travel bans and other mobility restrictions, and mass surveillance. The government utilized a new tool—the “Health QR Code” (jiankangma)—geared for mass cyber surveillance (Chen and Cohen 2020). Though criticized for its reliance on extensive violations of human rights (Jiang 2022), this “Zero-COVID” policy was in effect for full two years until the appearance of the Omicron variant, characterized by a relatively high rate of asymptomatic carriers. The appearance of this more contagious variant resulted in even stricter lockdowns, which, in turn, disrupted residents’ access to food and everyday necessities, yielded higher unemployment rates, and resulted in an economic slowdown (Lin et al. 2024). Faced with nationwide protests, the Chinese government abruptly abandoned the “Zero-COVID” policy in December 2022 (Chotiner 2022; Wolfe 2022).

Taiwan’s early official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, between January 2020 and mid-May 2021, featured strict border control, mandatory quarantine, and contact tracing (Yen 2020), which resulted in an extremely low number of confirmed infection cases (Chiu et al. 2021). During the second phase, from May to July 2021, characterized by the community outbreak period with large numbers of infected Delta-variant cases, the government changed its policy to soft lockdown and issued limitations on people’s daily activities, including mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing, limited group gathering both indoors and outdoors, and closure of non-essential businesses and venues (Chu 2023). The third phase, from August 2021 to the end of 2021, marks a relaxing of the strict pandemic control measures, with schools and other organizations and businesses reopening, and restrictions on gathering loosening. By spring 2022, 80 per cent of Taiwanese had received two shots of vaccines and more than 99 per cent of the COVID-positive cases during that time had been asymptomatic or mild (Lai et al. 2023). The “Zero-COVID” policy ended in Taiwan on 7 April 2022.

Although the Chinese government primarily relied on neighborhood committees, an example of community-based semi-formal control, for the enforcement of COVID-19 measures (Wei et al. 2020), the police were included in the enforcement as well. The police were entrusted to enforce the COVID-19 rules “when citizens refuse to obey various quarantine rules or accept medical treatments” (Jiang and Xie 2020, p. 1130). Furthermore, the police were in charge of enforcing legal rules concerning a variety of pandemic-related crimes (e.g. manufacturing and selling of fake medical devices, online and telephone fraud, and price gouging; Jiang and Xie 2020). Finally, the police applied the censorship rules, curtailed any dissenting options, and helped maintain the rhetoric of the “Zero-COVID” policy success (Zhai 2023).

The Taiwan police played important roles in disease prevention, detection, and containment efforts during the pandemic. For instance, during the months of stringent disease controls, the police, assisted by big data and cellphone tracking, could trace all quarantined individuals’ whereabouts (Ngerng 2020). Violators might then be subjected to fines, compensations, and/or placement in centralized quarantine facilities (Lin et al. 2020). Despite the additional powers and responsibilities with which the police were endowed during the pandemic, some evidence suggests that the public continued to recognize police legitimacy during the pandemic (Kuo et al. 2023). It appears that a synergy of the state and civil society in this Asian democracy has effectively promoted citizens’ voluntary compliance with state policies and police directives (Yen 2020). In turn, the government had public support and maintained its legitimacy (An and Tang 2020).

Based on the review of extant literature, we have developed the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Perceived greater procedural justice has a direct and positive effect on perceived public cooperation.

Hypothesis 2: Perceived greater decrease in reactive policing has a positive and direct effect on perceived public cooperation (H2a) and procedural justice (H2b).

Hypothesis 3: Perceived greater decrease in proactive and community policing has a negative and direct effect on perceived public cooperation (H3a) and procedural justice (H3b).

Hypothesis 4: Perceived greater procedural justice could mediate the effect of perceived decrease in reactive policing (H4a) and proactive and community policing (H4b) on perceived public cooperation.

METHODS

Data collection

The data employed in the current study were drawn from a larger international project, entitled “Police Organizational Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which included police officers’ assessments of police work during the COVID-19 pandemic from 11 countries across the globe (e.g. Croatia, the United States, South Africa, the Philippines, Brazil; Wu et al. 2021; Maskály et al. 2021c; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024a). Whereas the project was launched by a team of U.S. and U.K.-based researchers, it relied on international collaborations (with local researchers in each country) to conduct data collection. Specifically, a group of Chinese and Taiwanese researchers translated the original English questionnaire into Simplified and Traditional Chinese (the two translated questionnaires are highly similar besides some wording differences, such as the translations for “the Internet” and “police tenure,” and how “racial/ethnic minority” is defined). They also communicated with potential participants and distributed the paper-and-pencil surveys to police officers in their respective countries in 2021. In the end, we collected a total of 600 valid responses from China (49.5 per cent of the total sample) and 613 from Taiwan (50.5 per cent of the total sample). All 600 Chinese respondents answered the entire questionnaire with no missing values; slightly more Taiwanese officers skipped questions in the survey, but the completion rate was far above 90 per cent overall (only one person missed 15.9 per cent of the questionnaire).

Measures

Outcome variable

The current research seeks to explore factors influencing Chinese and Taiwanese police officers’ perceptions of change regarding citizen cooperation with the police during the peak month of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to before the pandemic. The outcome variable, perceived public cooperation, is composed of five items (all factor loadings are above 0.70; Appendix  1). Respondents were asked to indicate how much things have changed—as a result of departmental/governmental changes made in response to COVID-19 pandemic—regarding “community members’ willingness to obey the police,” “community members’ willingness to obey the laws in general,” “community members’ willingness to obey COVID-19 laws and regulations,” “community members’ willingness to cooperate with the police in general,” and “community members’ willingness to cooperate with the police about COVID-19 laws and regulations.” All five items were answered on a five-point scale from 1 being “made much worse” to 5 representing “made much better.” Appendix  2 reports the frequency distributions of the five items that form the perceived public cooperation factor.

Exogenous variables

One of the most prevalent aspects of the “departmental/organizational changes made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic” is the type and frequency of different policing activities officers are expected to perform. In this research, we asked the respondents to indicate how much their responsibilities (i.e. both proactive and reactive policing activities) have changed during the peak month of the pandemic compared to about one year ago (before the pandemic). In particular, we focus on three essential tasks: “the number of calls for service [they] handled in person,” “the number of arrests for minor crimes [they] made,” and “[they] engaged in face-to-face community policing and problem-solving activities.” Each item is originally measured on a five-point scale about the degree of change observed (1 = much less than before, 2 = somewhat less than before, 3 = no change, 4 = somewhat more than before, 5 = much more than before). As in-person policing activities have become much more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in contexts like China and Taiwan, we reverse-coded these items so that a greater value indicates a larger reduction of the activity (Table 1).

We also expect that officers’ personal dispositions could exhibit some effect on how they perceive public cooperation. We thus incorporate five unique sociodemographic variables as controls, including their supervisory status (0 = non-supervisor, 1 = supervisor), marital status (0 = single/divorced/separated/widowed, 1 = currently married), educational attainment (0 = high school or police college, 1 = college or higher), gender (0 = male, 1 = female), and finally, officer tenure (1 = under 5 years, 2 = 6–10 years, 3 = 11–15 years, 4 = 16–20 years, 5 = over 20 years).

Mediating variable

In light of previous research on public opinions and compliance toward the police (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006; Meško and Tankebe 2014; Bolger and Walters 2019), we hypothesize that procedural justice could potentially mediate the effect of organizational changes on perceived public cooperation with the police. As our outcome measures the degree of perceived change in community cooperation, the mediating variable is also measured by how much change officers perceive there to be regarding police procedural justice. In specific, we compose the latent variable with six interrelated items about the consequences of departmental and governmental changes regarding, for instance, “police officers treating citizens in a fair and consistent manner” and “police officers making decisions based on trustworthy reasons” (all factor loadings are above 0.75; Appendix  1). These items are also measured on a five-point scale from “made much worse” (1) to “made much better” (5). Appendix  2 reports the frequency distributions of the six items that form the procedural justice factor.

Analytic strategy

The current research is interested in whether and how procedural justice mediates the relationship between changes in policing activities and officers’ perceived community compliance. We believe that SEM has the best potential to untangle the inter-relationships between the exogenous, mediating, and outcome variables, along with the control variables of officer sociodemographics. We also find adequate model fit, as suggested by the fit statistics (e.g. RMSEA = 0.032, CFI = 0.990, SRMR = 0.025).

Before proceeding with the SEM analyses, we first employ CFA to estimate the endogenous measures of the outcome and mediating variables. Model fit statistics once again suggest that the model fits the data adequately (e.g. RMSEA = 0.050, CFI = 0.992, SRMR = 0.033). All items also load onto their respective latent factors with high factor loadings (see Appendix  1), and we report no concern for cross-loading between the two latent constructs.

RESULTS

Direct effects

We first report on the direct paths leading to the outcome variable of perceived public cooperation (Table 2; Fig. 2). Most notably, the explanatory model explains the outcome of perceived public cooperation very well (R² = 0.46). In specific, we find a significant and positive association between procedural justice and perceived public cooperation (β = 0.65). In other words, increased levels of procedural justice are associated with increases in the level of perceived public compliance and cooperation with the police as well. Specifically, with one standard deviation increase in procedural justice, there is an expected 0.65 standard deviation increase in perceived cooperation. Two of the three policing activities, both reactive, namely the reductions in the number of calls for service handled in person (β = 0.13) and in the number of arrests for minor crimes that the officer made (β = 0.07), also exert significant, positive, and direct affects on the officers’ perceived public cooperation—the greater the reductions in these activities, the more improved perceived community cooperation is. Meanwhile, a reduction in engaging in face-to-face community policing and problem-solving activities has no direct effect on perceived public cooperation. Lastly, only one sociodemographic variable—marital status—shapes the outcome directly, with officers who are currently married reporting greater increases in perceived public cooperation than those who are not (β = 0.05).

Indirect and total effects

The formal test of indirect and total effects results shows that the level of reduction in the number of calls for service handled in person has a significant, positive, total influence on perceived cooperation (β = 0.13), and this positive influence is chiefly a direct one with almost no indirect effect at all (Table 3). Reduction in the number of arrests for minor crimes, meanwhile, does not exert any significant total or indirect effect on perceived cooperation. This is because although its direct, positive effect is significant, as previously mentioned, its indirect effect through procedural justice is not significant yet negative, rendering the total effect non-significant. Lastly, the reduction in the number of in-person proactive policing activities has no significant total effect but a significant, indirect effect on perceived cooperation (β = −0.05). This means that a reduction in community- and problem-oriented activities is linked to decreased perceived public cooperation through the mediating mechanism of reduced officer delivery of procedural justice.

To recapitulate, the results show that for police reactive activities, although reductions in the in-person handling of calls and the arrests for minor crimes do not shape perceived levels of procedural justice, they have direct correlations with increased perceived public cooperation. A decrease in the in-person handling of calls has a total, positive effect on perceived cooperation, and this effect is all direct. Meanwhile, a reduction in the number of arrests for minor crimes does not exert a total or indirect effect on perceived cooperation. For police proactive activities, a reduction in community policing and problem-solving activities does not influence perceived public cooperation directly. However, it exerts a negative indirect effect on perceived cooperation. The less frequently officers engaged in in-person proactive activities, the less they perceived that procedural justice was delivered during police-citizen interactions, and the less they believed local residents were willing to comply with the law and cooperate with the police.

CONCLUSION

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the police across the world to engage in unanticipated reforms (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Alvarado et al. 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a; Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023). The changes were extensive, affecting police reactive and proactive activities and community policing activities (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Alvarado et al. 2020; Ashby 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a; Walklate et al. 2022b; Lum et al. 2023; Makin et al. 2023). Using the sample of more than 1200 police officers from China and Taiwan, we advance the extant literature by exploring the perceived effects of the reform in reactive and proactive police activities on the perceived relationship between the police and the community.

First, our analyses document that police officers who perceive that police officers use procedural justice during the pandemic more frequently than before are also more likely to report increased public cooperation. This finding comes as no surprise in light of both the recent COVID-19 pandemic literature (Murphy et al. 2021; Williamson et al. 2022) and a broader non-pandemic literature (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006; Meško and Tankebe 2014; Bolger and Walters 2019), both of which uniformly point out the consistent effects of procedural justice on public compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police. Our results demonstrate that procedural justice matters in the states of emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. These results have clear policy implications for both policymakers and police administrators.

Second, the findings show that a reduction in reactive police activities was positively associated with perceived public compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police. During the peak of the pandemic, typically the volume of reported crimes was lower (Ashby 2020), there were fewer in-person responses and fewer arrests for minor crimes (Alvarado et al. 2020; Lum et al. 2023; Maskály et al. 2021a), and the police were less visible (Nouri and Kochel 2022) and had fewer direct, negative contacts with the public. These changes may coincide with an increased level of public compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police during the early-peak period of the pandemic, as citizens understand that they are in an emergency situation that requires crisis policing. Public support for crisis policing, however, tends to decline as the pandemic progressed into the later stages (Perry and Jonathan-Zamir 2020). Therefore, it is not unexpected that when we asked police officers about the changes observed comparing the pre-pandemic and pandemic-peak periods (i.e. during the front part of pandemic-policing), a sheer reduction in the amount of reactive police activities is linked to an increased level of perceived public cooperation.

Looking at calls for service in person specifically, its reduction in amount exerts a significant, positive, total effect on public cooperation. This impact is all direct, with no indirect effect through procedural justice. When it comes to arrests for minor crimes, its reduction in amount exerts no significant total effect on perceived public cooperation, yet it does show a significant, direct, positive effect on increased perceived public cooperation. The indirect effect of reduced arrests for minor crimes, although negative, is not significant. Overall, these results show the beneficial effects of reduced reactive police activities on promoting perceived public compliance and cooperation, and these connections are not so much explained by the treatment quality of police-citizen direct contact (e.g. whether the officers are polite, respectful), but rather through the reduction of the quantity of police-citizen contacts, many of which are likely negative in nature (e.g. making arrests).

The somewhat differential effects of the police reform in two aspects of reactive police activities on perceived public compliance/cooperation suggest that not all aspects of this unanticipated police reform might be equally beneficial to the police-community relationships during the pandemic. Arrests, particularly those that are conducted in a procedurally unjust manner, still have the potential to make a negative influence on public compliance/cooperation even during the pandemic. Future research could further differentiate these types of activities and provide a more in-depth exploration of their effects, be it on the police-community relationship, police wellness, or police culture.

Third, studies indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a decrease of in-person proactive and community policing activities (Alexander and Ekici 2020; Maskály et al. 2021a, 2021c; Lum et al. 2023; Kutnjak Ivković et al. 2024b). Although we expected that police officers who perceived that the police reduced in-person proactive and community policing activities would also be more likely to expect less public cooperation, our results showed that the perceived reduction in such activities does not have a significant, total effect on decreased perceived community compliance with the law and cooperation with the police. While changes to proactive police activities do not seem to be directly associated with perceived compliance/cooperation, we do find that the reduction in in-person community- and problem-oriented activities is indirectly linked to decreased perceived compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police through the mediating mechanism of reduced officer delivery of procedural justice. That is, the cooperation-promoting effect of community- and problem-oriented policing on perceived public compliance/cooperation is chiefly explained by officers’ procedurally just behaviors exhibited during these community- and problem-oriented activities, which are less likely to involve negative confrontations with citizens. Our results reinforce the critical role of procedural justice and resonate with the pre-pandemic studies indicating that engagement in in-person community policing activities improves public willingness to cooperate with the police (Peyton et al. 2019). Future research could explore whether a decrease in in-person proactive and community policing activities would have the same effect on perceived police cooperation in all police agencies, conditional upon the changes in virtual proactive and community policing activities.

This study has some limitations. First, we explored police officers’ perceptions of, rather than the actual changes in, the reduction of reactive and proactive police activities. While our methodology allowed us to explore how police officers view the reductions in these kinds of activities as related to their perceptions of community cooperation and procedural justice, our methodology does not allow us to compare the effect of actual changes in reactive and proactive activities. Second, our study focuses on police officers. We purposely focused on police officers because they are in the best position to ascertain how much the nature of their proactive and reactive activities changed during the pandemic. Future studies could explore whether the same pathways of direct and indirect relationships would apply to citizen views of cooperation with the police as well. Third, our samples are collected in two Asian countries, and our study, although making a significant contribution to the mostly Western literature on the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot tell the stories of other Asian countries. Future research should explore the degree to which our findings about the relationship between a reduction in reactive and proactive police activities and perceived community cooperation are shared across Asia and the world.

Based on the surveys of police officers in China and Taiwan, our study reaffirms that the COVID-19 police reform in reactive and proactive police activities significantly affected police expectations of public compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police, directly or indirectly through changes to procedurally just behaviors. In making policy recommendations, our findings highlight the importance of distinguishing across different types of police activities because their reduction does not relate the same way to procedural justice and further to perceived public cooperation. Finally, our study reiterates the critical role that procedural justice could play in public compliance with the laws and cooperation with the police, especially in emergencies, be they natural or man-made.

Conflict of interest. None declared.

Funding

None declared.

APPENDIX 1. CFA RESULTS FOR LATENT VARIABLES

APPENDIX 2. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL ITEMS THAT FORM THE LATENT FACTORS

REFERENCES