At the same time, minority group members in these neighborhoods are more intolerant of deviance than whites are, even taking into account poverty and instability. Perhaps most striking is the revelation of a neighborhood-based explanation for the high levels of legal cynicism and dissatisfaction with the police among blacks. Once neighborhood economic disadvantage is taken into account, blacks' views are found to be similar to whites'. Blacks appear to be more cynical toward or dissatisfied with the police only because they are more likely to live where disadvantage is concentrated. Even in neighborhoods where the rate of violent crime is high, there is no difference between the races in attitudes toward the police.
Racial differences disappear when neighborhood context is considered.
Thus, residents' estrangement from the police is better explained by neighborhood context than race. If there is a system of values that tolerates deviance and violence and turns a cynical eye toward the law and agents of the justice system, it is not linked in a simple way to race. This suggests that to design more effective crime control strategies, policymakers and agents of the criminal justice system would do well to consider the role of community social norms. Robert J. Sampson, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Research Fellow with the American Bar Foundation. Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a former predoctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation.