Perceptions of Police Corruption in Medellín

Conventional wisdom holds that police corruption is a scourge across Latin America, undermining citizens’ trust in and collaboration with police officers. We find that this does not describe police-community relations in Medellín. Using original survey data in Medellín, we find perceptions of police corruption are only weakly correlated with perceptions of police quality along other dimensions. This finding echoes evidence from qualitative field notes from more than 400 police-community meetings, where citizens seldom voiced concerns about police corruption, but often voiced concerns about other aspects of police performance.