It is often suggested that the British policing model is one of public ‘consent,’ which is traceable to what became known as the Peelian Principles of 1829, developed by Commissioners Rowan and Mayne (Lentz & Chaires, 2007). Over the years, policing by public consent as a model has been tested in Britain, but not more than right now. In fact, Baroness Casey in 2023 concluded it was broken (Baroness Casey Review, 2023).
The notion of consent is related to legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness with an implication that without trust and confidence, policing will not succeed (Rosenbaum, et al, 2005; Tyler, 2006). Procedural justice research by Tyler (2006) emphasises that it is not only what the police do, but how they do it, that influences public perceptions of fairness and ‘buy in’ by the public (Nix, 2015).
Measuring trust and confidence
In recent times, there have been numerous efforts to gauge to what extent members of the public have trust and confidence in policing, and additional efforts have been made to seek a better understanding why public perceptions fluctuate over time (Skogan, 2009; Javid and Morrell, 2019).
The complexity around assessing what at first glance may appear to be simple concepts is that trust and confidence themselves mean slightly different things across different populations, nationalities and across borders (Jackson and Bradford, 2010; Cao, 2015). For example, confidence might be construed as generalised and related to performance (Hohl, et al, 2010), whilst trust may lean more specifically towards matters of integrity and ethics (Albrecht, 2019).
How to measure critical concepts
The field of policing has wrestled with measuring trust and confidence for some time (Jackson and Bradford, 2010), as the resulting perceptions often vary depending on the specific questions being asked, and who, when, and how the inquiries are posed. In 2008, the Home Office used a Public Service Agreement (PSA) structure, which identified a distinct goal of making communities safer through increased confidence in policing (PSA Target 23). These inquiries were included in the British Crime Survey (which later became the ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’). However, these PSA targets were dropped in 2010, although the Office of National Statistics (ONS) continued to conduct public surveys which examined public perceptions of the police.
Recent Research on Police Perceptions
The ‘YouGov’ surveying (2023) has revealed a decline in confidence in policing between 2022 and 2023. The responses in this initiative revealed that responses to levels of ‘not very much’ or ‘no confidence at all in the police to deal with crime; dropped from 52% to 48% and perceptions of the ‘police doing a good job’ fell from 60% to 50%. The Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2023) charted a confidence level in policing of 63% in 2006, 72% by 2011 and rising to 79% in 2016, before a regression to 74% in 2020. There were clear differences based on race with Blacks showing a decline to 64% and clearly significantly lower than other groups.
What is confidence?
Albrecht (2019) points out that it would be misleading to say that there are concrete and fixed definitions of trust and confidence from the perspective of the police. This means that awareness of varying interpretations of data and its collection must be considered (Kearns, et al, 2020).
Whilst one may construe confidence as being about the perceived capabilities to function, e.g. organizational or personal performance, Cao (2015) reminds us that it may rather be a generalised impression of the reputational regard held for the police at an institutional level. As such, there may be a difference in whether the public think if they ring for help the police will respond, but, to what extent they might consistently do a good job once there. That seems to perhaps refer to the differences between efficiency, effectiveness and police service delivery.
Morrell, et al, (2020) argued that confidence is a combination of trust, fairness and visibility, which tends to echo Stanko and Bradford (2009). There should be awareness over whether the perceptions are generalised or from a particular data source, such as those in recent direct contact with the police, such as crime victims (Jackson and Bradford, 2010) or suspects.
What is trust?
Albrecht (2019) frames trust as linked to ethics and integrity, whilst Tyler, et al, (2015) express trust conceptually as to what extent the police are honest and caring. Goldsmith (2005) argues that trust is based on direct interaction, whilst Skogan (2017) suggests it is a matter of reputational quality of service.
This suggests that personal experiences (Boda and Medve-Balint, 2017) may influence future expectations, yet reputational influences may come from social media, just as any commercial branding may have its reputation enhanced or depleted by populist coverage. That may be played out, for example, concerning feelings of vulnerability or the fear of crime (Payne and Gainey, 2007; Nalla and Nam, 2021). This has been illustrated repeatedly over the last three decades, as fear of crime has, at times, increased, even when crime rates had declined dramatically. A single tragic and sensationalized criminal incident highlighted in the media can stoke elevated fear in the general public.
As there is this variation across these two terms, one should not get overly fixated on precision as that could simply be contextual, rather than a universal response variable. Mazerolle, et al, (2013) adds to the complexity of things by including another measure, that of ‘satisfaction,’ but Merry, et al, (2012) argued that it was more straightforward to use the single measure of public confidence.
Understanding what is being measured
Whilst the terms trust and confidence can have their own subtle nuances, the public being measured are not homogenous, so there are contextual differences there too that have to be factored into assessing public attitudes. Hu, et al, (2020) cites the relevance of differentiating across gender, age and ethnicity for example, and Bradford, et al, (2017) pointed to differences across migration history. Different groups and communities are often defined by their socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts, meaning factors that facilitate or are barriers to successful collaboration with the police differ from group to group. Brewster, et al, (2018) also identified that socio-economic factors can also influence perceptions, which in turn are relevant to understanding the collective agency of community demographics and cohesion (Yesberg and Bradford, 2021).
‘Managerial decisions have been taken to prioritise processes over people,
with a stubbornly arrogant resistance to appreciate
that trust and confidence is about relationships, not algorithms.’
O’Connell (2020)
There are also further subtleties to be unravelled over what may be police, or public, priorities, where the police may quote crime statistics, yet the public may have more interest in prosocial or antisocial behaviour in their respective neighbourhood (Jackson, et al, 2009).
As we are seeing of late, there is also the increasing influence from dynamic social media, and the whole context of information and misinformation here are themselves both important and complex (Allcott et al, 2019; Ellis, 2021; Czudnochowski & Ludewig, 2023). Javid and Morrell (2019) assert the media heavily influences public perception of the police, a point reinforced by Livingstone (2022) who suggests that the police should take social influencing more seriously, whilst O’Connor & Zaidi (2021) recommend that police agencies should be much more proactive in their social media investment.
Relational factors
Local police actions can influence trust and confidence in the sense that experiences of how personnel interact and the amount of positive and visible two-way communication can affect perceptions of how the public regard the police (Merry et al, 2012). O’Connell (2020) argues the bedrock of policing by consent concerns the human relationships between the police and the community, and emphasises that this is achieved not through pro forma processes but having conversations about what matters to people.
Relationships between the community and their local police are likely to affect levels of confidence (Sindall and Sturgis, 2013). Those knowing police personnel by name or sight are likely to rate their confidence positively, as well as those who believe they could influence policing decisions in their area (Merry, et al, 2012). Wedlock and Tapley (2016) suggest that negative policing encounters carried more influence than positive ones. As such, word went around quicker and farther across the neighbourhood for matters of distrust than vice versa.
The irony is that, given neighbourhood policing was decimated since 2010 through austerity cuts, those policing by consent relations were abandoned in favour of ‘what works,’ which has focused on hot spot deployment (Innes, et al, 2020). Despite arguments by Neyroud and Weisburd (2014) that ‘science’ was the way forward for policing, the reality is that policing has the most data it has ever held, but its trust levels have regularly declined year over year (OBS, 2023). O’Connell (2020) argues that this is precisely because managerial decisions have been taken to prioritise processes over people, with a stubbornly arrogant resistance to appreciate that trust and confidence are about relationships, not mathematical algorithms and statistical data.
In short, improving trust and confidence is about listening, not counting things: analysis is one thing, action is quite another.
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