Trust in police among humanitarian migrants in Australia: changes in a decade since resettlement

Trust in police is fundamental to public safety, institutional legitimacy and social cohesion, yet comparatively little is known about how humanitarian migrants’ trust in police evolves over time following resettlement. Using data from Building a New Life in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Humanitarian Migrants, this study investigates within-person change in trust in police across four waves of panel data spanning a decade of resettlement in Australia, as well as the time-varying and time-invariant predictors of trust trajectories. A fixed effects regression model reveals that trust changes significantly within individuals over the observation period, rising modestly at Wave 5 before declining at Wave 6. A multilevel ordered logistic regression model further shows that past-year discrimination is the strongest and most consistent predictor of reduced trust, with those experiencing discrimination having approximately 65% lower odds of reporting higher trust, a finding consistent with the waning ‘reference effect’ and waxing ‘discrimination effect’ theorised in the literature on migrant police trust. Having a mixed social network and being older are associated with higher trust, while having spent time in refugee camps overseas and belonging to certain country-of-origin groups are associated with lower trust. The findings accentuate the long-term significance of post-settlement discrimination, social integration processes and pre-arrival experiences in shaping humanitarian migrants’ perceptions of police. Policy implications for procedurally just and culturally responsive policing in multicultural communities are discussed.