A Study about the Factors Affecting People's Trust to Police

The characteristics of modern society have produced new functions for trust. Given the existing concerns for maintaing social order and control in modern society, people's trust to police has gained a high significance and importance. Two general perspectives exist to explain the formation of trust. According to society-centered approach, trust expands as people's participation in formal and informal netwoks increases.In contrast, institution-centerd approach argues that the institutions that arecentral for the creating and maintaining trust are the policy-implementing institutions, that is, public service systems. The present paper seeks to compare these two perspectives with regard to people's trust to police. In doing so, it employed survey method with 7949 respondents from rural and urban areas in Mazandaran province. The multi-satge clustered sampling method was used. The findings showed hat for the explanation of people's trust to police, social factors, in particular, the quality of government is more effective than the background variables and even participation in voluntary associations. Thus it can be argued that people's attitudes towards government agents and the performance of public organizations have a strong influence on their evaluation of police trustworthy.