International Policing Missions: Establishing Trustworthy Policing in Low-trust Environments

In this chapter, we explore everyday understandings of trust among a group
of Australian police peacekeepers and capacity-builders in international
police missions. Their views provide some insight into how international
police personnel approach their work in missions, including how they deal
with local police counterparts and local people, and how they assess the
effectiveness and relevance of what they do. Their ability to work in these
environments, it will emerge, is frequently expressed in terms of trust—the
need to build trust among local people, the need to establish trust with
the local police to whom they are providing training or other forms of
assistance. Conversely, the difficulties that these foreign police face is often seen by them as reflective of an absence of trust. Trust is arguably a more
fundamental requirement for good policing than for ‘good soldiering’, as
policing is premised upon ongoing, civil relationships with local people in
which mutual understanding and cooperation keeps both the use of force
or its threatened use to a tolerable minimum. Military forces, by contrast,
tend to have limited engagements with local people and to rely more upon
threat or use of overwhelming force to secure their objectives. As policing
increasingly features in international peacekeeping missions, often working
alongside military forces, how police officers can establish trust becomes an
important practical issue.