Do people think police are meeting minimum standards of service delivery?

Summary

The relationship between police and public is currently an issue of significant concern. According to some metrics, trust and confidence are at their lowest ebb for 20 years. Aiming to go beyond established indicators such as perceptions of ‘how good a job’ local police are doing; we created a nationally representative survey based on the Minimum Policing Standard.

Alongside a range of other measures, 18 survey items probed views on the extent to which police are achieving minimum standards across three domains:

1. Response to calls for service and other contact
2. Behaviour and Treatment in relation to the public
3. Presence and Engagement in local communities.

Overall, people think police are falling far short of providing the service they should. Our findings concur with the idea that there is currently a crisis of confidence in police and police legitimacy. Yet, viewed from another perspective public trust in police remains stubbornly and perhaps surprisingly high.

Background

Relations between police and public are currently at a low ebb. The service has been beset by multiple scandals and other problems, many of which are thought to impact on public opinion.

On many measures, trust and confidence in the police have been falling for nearly a decade, reaching levels not seen since the early 2000s. This has sparked renewed policy and academic interest in questions of public trust and police legitimacy, much of which relies on survey evidence to understand the trends in and sources of people’s views of the police.

Many current surveys of attitudes towards police have several features in common. They reuse questions from other surveys, some of which are now 40 years old. They frequently rely on single item measures of key constructs (e.g., “how much do you trust police”). And most survey items, whether well-established or new, are fielded because they are of interest to the surveyors, not necessarily the people being surveyed.

There are good reasons for all these choices, including maintaining the consistent time series that allow us to identify declining trust and confidence. However, they risk missing what is most important to the people being surveyed, the people who, after all, police are meant to serve.

We wanted to try a different approach. We used the criteria developed in our earlier work on the Minimum Policing Standard to come up with a set of survey questions grounded in what the public thinks is important in and for the policing they experience in their communities. Knowing what people think about local policing, in terms that are relevant to them, should provide important information for efforts to enhance trust and confidence.

What we did

We commissioned polling company Verian to conduct a population representative survey of England, Wales and Scotland that fielded questions developed from our work on developing the Minimum Policing Standard.

These covered the three domains of Response, Behaviour and Treatment, and Presence and Engagement (see Figures 1 to 3). Alongside the Minimum Policing Standard items we fielded a range of other questions, covering public attitudes towards police and contact with officers, views on the limits and boundaries of policing, and when behaviours or issues warrant or require police intervention.

We distinguished between different, and often conflated, aspects of people’s views of and attitudes toward police, e.g. legitimacy and trust. Legitimacy is a subjective assessment of the police’s ‘right to rule’, and of the reciprocal duties this places on the policed. Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable to police that is based on positive evaluations and expectations of competence, benevolence and good intentions. The Minimum Policing Standard items can be thought of as measures of confidence in police, a conscious evaluation of whether police are trustworthy – i.e. whether they are in fact competent, benevolent and well-intentioned.

Key findings

Many people do not think police are meeting minimum standards of service provision. Figure 1 covers the Response domain, showing the proportion of people agreeing with each statement. There are two bars for each indicator: the darker line gives the percentage calculated with ‘don’t know’ responses excluded, while the lighter line gives the percentage calculated while retaining ‘don’t knows’.

The Minimum Policing Standard items garnered high numbers of such responses – up to a third in a few cases – indicating a lack of certainty, knowledge or simple awareness among some respondents. Survey results are usually shown with ‘don’t know’ responses excluded. But given the way the Minimum Policing Standard items were derived, they should arguably be retained here. A ‘don’t know’ response indicates at the very least uncertainty or a lack of confidence about whether a particular standard is being met.

Whether or not ‘don’t knows’ are retained, no Response indicator achieves more than 50% positive responses; most have less than 40%, and less than 30% are confident that police are open and transparent with the decisions they make, prioritise the crimes most affecting their community, and provide adequate follow up after a crime has been committed.

Figure 1: Response domain

Percentage agreeing with each statement that the police…