Title: Family Matters: How Social Network Ties Between Citizens and Police Officers Reduce Public Safety

Abstract: States suffering from low legitimacy face a challenge in improving public safety: police officers depend on citizen engagement to resolve disputes and reduce crime but low legitimacy reduces citizen willingness to engage with state institutions, especially the police. In an effort to break this cycle, many states have turned to recruiting "embedded" officers who have many social ties with the citizens they serve. Social ties may reduce citizens' search costs and improve their expectations of officers effort, increasing their willingness to engage. We challenge this logic by arguing that even though individuals with close social ties to officers may be more cooperative, officer social embeddedness at the community level does more harm than good. In areas where officers on average have many personal ties, the citizens who are left out of officer social networks are prone to feeling that officers can no longer serve as neutral arbiters who impartially provide services. We test this argument on law enforcement in an area of the Philippines with an active insurgent presence. We construct family networks in 298 villages and locate public safety officers within those networks. We then survey nearly 5,000 citizens to test the impact of citizen-officer social ties on trust, information provision, and crime victimization. Consistent with our argument, citizens exhibit greater trust in, perceive as fairer, and are more likely to report a crime to individual officers who are more socially proximate to them. However, at the village-level, high officer embeddedness is associated with reduced citizen satisfaction and increased crime victimization, especially among individuals who have few personal connections to officers.