ORCID

0000-0003-2948-1787

Keywords

Police militarization; Police legitimacy; Chronic stress; Trauma exposure; Latin America; U.S. Latinos

Subject Categories

International Relations | Political Science | Social Psychology

Abstract

Public trust in police is central to regime legitimacy, yet reforms intended to build trust produce inconsistent results, and communities facing comparable conditions can respond differently to similar policing. This dissertation accounts for that variation by examining how stress shapes citizens’ responses to police visual cues. It proposes a framework in which citizens interpret these cues through their general trust in police—trust that weighs more heavily under stress. This framework is examined through a multi-method design spanning the Americas. Study 1 merges AmericasBarometer data with the Global Police Militarization Dataset across nineteen countries (2010–2023) to examine how stress and national policing structures relate to trust in police. Study 2 fields an original survey experiment in Mexico (N = 801) and among U.S. Latinos (N = 520), randomly assigning respondents to view an officer in either a traditional patrol or a militarized uniform. Semi-structured interviews illustrate the proposed mechanisms qualitatively. Across both experiments, the militarized uniform produced substantially lower trust than the traditional patrol uniform, and elevated stress was associated with reduced trust. The moderating influence of stress was concentrated on the militarized uniform: among U.S. Latino respondents reporting elevated stress, trust in the militarized officer was lowest—falling below respondents’ own general trust in police—whereas patrol-officer evaluations remained comparatively stable. In the Mexican sample, where general trust in police was uniformly low, both uniforms were evaluated against a background of broad distrust that attenuated this differentiation. By specifying how stress conditions the appraisal of policing cues, the dissertation suggests that the trust costs of the militarized uniform may fall disproportionately on the stressed populations that police reforms are most often intended to reach.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Summer

Committee Chair

Kelsey Larsen

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs

Format

PDF

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

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