What do people really want from policing (and do they think they get it)?

• In Event: Legitimacy

Abstract

Opinion surveys have been probing public views of the police for more than half a century. In the UK, especially, a wealth of data generated over many years has demonstrated the waxing and waning of ‘trust and confidence’ in police. Yet, many of the survey questions currently used to measure these and related constructs are essentially legacies of earlier efforts. This has benefits in maintaining consistent time series, but risks missing developments in the way people think about police. In this paper we present results from a representative survey of England, Scotland and Wales that fielded items, developed through a series of focus groups, that define a ‘minimum policing standard’ – a set of services to local communities people think police simply should, under normal conditions, be able to provide. We show, first, that few respondents felt police are meeting these standards. Public views of policing are currently marked by high levels of uncertainty, disappointment, and disillusion. Second, scales developed from these items prove to be very strong predictors of key indices of public opinion used in policing studies, and indeed in police performance management, including trust, confidence and legitimacy. Third, we are able to show how different aspects of police performance – or at least people’s judgements of it – feed into these indices. In particular, visibility and ‘presence’ seem to be more important for confidence in police, while fairness and proportionality are far more important for legitimacy.

Authors

• Ben Bradford, University College London

• Christine A Weirich, University of Leeds

• David Rowlands, University of Leeds

• Adam Crawford, University of York