The Impact of Press Freedom on POLICE Confidence : An Empirical Analysis of 15 OECD Countries Including KOREA

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, community policing has been adopted in most of police agencies in the United States as well as many other countries to improve overall effectiveness of police departments and en-hance citizen’s perception toward police. Under the philosophy of community policing, police-community rela-tion is considered as one of important elements to success their missions. That is, effective community policing requires input of citizens regarding the needs and problems of the community. Thus, public attitude toward police can be very influential and should be one that is positive. For instance, there has always existed a cyclical relationship between the police and the public: distrust towards the police affects their effectiveness of crime control, which leads to an increase in crime that, ultimately, results in further distrust. Nationwide, principally in countries that have a widespread allocation of poverty and interference from an overreaching state or gov-ernment, law enforcement has been viewed particularly disapprovingly and untrusting due to past behaviors of their own police involved in corruption and dishonesty. Although there has been an extensive body of research that has been conducted on public confidence in the police, there has been limited research that has focused on press freedom and other nations. The purpose of current study, therefore, is to shed light on the public confidence in police across 15 OECD countries using the World Value Survey (2010-2014). Moreover, the study attempts to determine how press freedom influences the public confidence in policing forces across 15 countries. The findings from this study partially supported our research hypothesis where press freedom positively in-fluenced public confidence in the police agencies across the OECD countries. More specifically, consistent with prior research, individual characteristics of the respondents were statistically significant while the press free-dom became a non-significant factor on police confidence. In particular, people who were older, female, and have a high level of education tend to report a higher level of police confidence. In addition, two country level variables were statistically significant. That is, crime rates had a negative impact on police confidence while economic growth were positively related to the police confidence. Although the current study improves our understanding of the effect of press freedom on police confidence, there are several limitations, and future study needs to be conducted to better understand police confidence. Finally, implications for practice and fu-ture research are discussed.