Dialogue Meets the Choir: Trust Predicts Who Shows Up to Police Meetings

Why This Matters: Participatory dialogues are widely promoted to repair fractured police–community relations, but these interventions depend on who actually attends. If meetings primarily attract residents who already trust institutions, their capacity to build trust and reduce conflict is limited.

What Tara Slough, Dorothy Kronick, and Rebecca Hanson Did: The authors evaluate attendance and effects of police–community dialogue using a large-scale field experiment in Medellín, Colombia, complemented by cross-national survey evidence from 23 countries. The design links individuals' baseline trust in institutions to their likelihood of participating in public meetings and measures whether participation changes attitudes.

Key Methods and Evidence:

• A large randomized field intervention in Medellín invited residents to police–community meetings and tracked attendance and subsequent outcomes.
• Cross-national survey analyses examined who attends public meetings across 23 countries to test the generality of participation patterns.

Main Findings:

• In Medellín, residents who most trusted the police at baseline were about twice as likely to attend police–community meetings as those who least trusted them.
• The cross-national survey data show a similar pattern: people who most trust a given local institution (for example, city government) are the most likely to appear at that institution’s public meetings.
• Because attendees are disproportionately trusting already, the Medellín intervention’s ability to increase overall trust was weakened—an instance of the “preaching-to-the-choir” problem that the authors highlight as a broader threat to participatory initiatives.

What This Means For Policy and Research: These results caution policymakers and scholars that outreach-based, deliberative, or participatory programs may systematically attract the easiest-to-reach supporters, limiting their impact on skeptical or marginalized populations. Designing interventions that overcome self-selection into participation or directly target low-trust groups is essential to realize the intended trust-building effects.