University Honors

University students are often exposed to two types of police officers: some dedicated solely to campus policing, and others dedicated to the broader community. My goal for this project is to better understand UCR studentsí perceptions of both types of officers. Additionally, I assess studentsí comfort interacting with campus police officers who either share or do not share their race/ethnicity and gender. Students first completed a series of surveys assessing their perceptions of campus and community police. Next, they read a series of vignettes describing good deeds the officers performed and rated their perceptions of officers in each vignette. I found that students rated campus police officers moderately positively, and rated campus police more positively than community police officers. However, match between participantsí and officersí race/ethnicity or gender was not related to participantsí comfort levels. Given that campus police officers were more positively perceived than community police officers, campus police might highlight their role in serving the campus specifically to further improve their relationship with students. Moreover, our findings that officer race/ethnicity and gender were unrelated to participantsí comfort level suggests that daily positive interactions with police officers are especially important to studentsí comfort. Keywords: Law enforcement, Campus police, Community police, University of California, Riverside