The police and local community safety: an assessment by school-age youth
The police and local community safety: an assessment by school-age youth

Summary/Abstract: Local public safety consists in ensuring that members of a given local community lead their lives in safety, using both lawful and legal means. The Police, being the organ specifically vested with this responsibility, especially with regards to crime, exercises direct control over a given local community. The aim of the article is to examine whether the results of police work appraisal by the minors could influence the behaviour of the assessors. The hypothesis presented in the article tests the existence of a correlation between the opinions regarding police work by juvenile respondents and their motivations to engage in reprehensible acts, including contacts with drugs. Analysis of the results of the survey, „The International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD-3)”, conducted in 2017 on a sample of over 2,000 pupils of the last grades of elementary schools and the first and second grades of lower secondary schools in Rzeszów and Białystok show that there exist statistically significant relationships between negative perceptions of the police by minors and their demoralizing behaviours. Key words: local community safety; police; community police officers; school-age youth; demoralization.

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