How do interactions with the police affect communities?
March 20, 2025
Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])
ANN ARBOR — Interactions with institutions shape our lives. From banks to universities to countless aspects of every level of government, institutional control and regulation affects how we work, live, and do business.
How do we measure these interactions? What effects do they have? Who is held to account for the negative aspects of these societal relationships? These are difficult and complicated questions to investigate, but their answers can be transformative.
Over the past decade or more, interactions between police and the communities they serve have come under increased scrutiny, with police action in some cases sparking protests, investigations, and more. How communities and individuals interact with this institution — the police — can have profound consequences, and Nick Camp of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), has been studying those consequences.
In September 2024, Camp delivered a presentation titled “Institutional Interactions: What everyday encounters reveal about the psychology of policing.” In it, he explored the factors that affect police interactions with their communities and how those interactions, in turn, shape the communities in which they take place.
Camp’s presentation is the basis for this episode of The Abstract. In it, we hear some of the background of Camp’s research into police interactions with the public as well as some of his findings.
Click here to listen to this episode. For more from Nick Camp, click here to view the entire presentation on which this episode was based.
For more from The Abstract, see the links below to hear a few more recent episodes.