Little is yet known about which factors influence the trust in the police of different ethnic minorities in European countries. This article is a step towards filling in that gap. To assess differences and similarities in the explanation of minority groups’ trust, we replicated a recent study on Turkish and Moroccan minority group members’ trust in the Belgian police (Van Craen, 2013). The study on which we report here shifted the focus from traditional minority groups in Belgium to a new immigrant group: Polish immigrants. We anticipated that our findings would depart in two ways. We hypothesized that social capital and perceptions of discrimination would not play an important role in the explanation of Polish immigrants’ trust in the Belgian police. Regression analyses on data gathered in the city of Antwerp (N = 418) suggest that there is no correlation between Polish immigrants’ social capital and their trust in law enforcement. However, perceptions of discrimination are a key explanatory factor for this minority group too. Implications for theorization and research are discussed.
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