A Study about the Factors Affecting People\\\'s Trust to Police

AbstractThe characteristics of modern society have produced new functions for trust. Given the existing concernsfor maintaing social order and control in modern society, people's trust to police has gained a highsignificance and importance. Two general perspectives exist to explain the formation of trust. According tosociety-centered approach, trust expands as people's participation in formal and informal netwoks increases.In contrast, institution-centerd approach argues that the institutions that arecentral for the creating and maintaining trust are the policy-implementing institutions, that is, public servicesystems. The present paper seeks to compare these two perspectives with regard to people's trust to police. Indoing so, it employed survey method with 7949 respondents from rural and urban areas in Mazandaranprovince. The multi-satge clustered sampling method was used. The findings showed that for the explanationof people's trust to police, social factors, in particular, the quality of government is more effective than thebackground variables and even participation in voluntary associations. Thus it can be argued that people'sattitudes towards government agents and the performance of public organizations have a strong influence ontheir evaluation of police trustworthy