New research from the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre reveals striking alignment between what the public want from policing and the service police officers themselves aspire to deliver. However, structural pressures and organisational barriers are making it difficult for this shared vision to be delivered in practice.
15 June 2026
The findings are published today in a new report, “The service that police officers want to provide, and why they struggle to deliver it”, coinciding with a presentation by Centre Co-Director Professor Adam Crawford, at the Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing (CCJP) and P-ACE Lab Annual Conference at the University of Birmingham.
The study is based on focus groups with frontline officers and senior police leaders in four police force areas across England and Wales. It builds on earlier work with members of the public and a national survey. Together, this previous research helped outline a “minimum policing standard” – a set of functions police should always be able to provide and the conduct they should adhere to.
Across all focus groups with the public, officers and senior leaders, there is strong agreement on the core elements of good local policing. These shared priorities include:
- appropriate response, e.g. fast and proportionate response and equal service across groups
- behaviour and treatment, e.g. treating the public with fairness and respect and behaving professionally
- presence and engagement, e.g. greater community police presence and a local community police officer
There is also a shared recognition that these are not being delivered consistently.
Officers framed neighbourhood policing as central to building trust because it enables visibility, continuity, local knowledge and early intervention. However, they described contemporary policing as fundamentally reactive rather than responsive, with staffing pressures, abstractions – where officers are pulled away from their usual duties for other reactive tasks – and increased workloads leading to reduced visibility, preventative work, problem-solving and neighbourhood policing capacity.
Many officers also highlighted concerns about organisational culture, leadership, and constrained discretion, which together contribute to declining morale and increasingly risk-averse approaches to policing.
Senior leaders agreed that neighbourhood policing was vital for building public trust, however, they described demand as complex and resource-intensive, particularly in safeguarding, domestic abuse, vulnerability and mental health contexts and argued that these ongoing pressures increasingly undermine preventative and relational forms of policing such as neighbourhood policing.
Speaking at the CCJP/P-ACE Lab conference, Professor Adam Crawford, Centre Co-Director, said:
“What is most striking about these findings is not disagreement about what good local policing looks like, but the extent to which both the public and the police share a common vision. The real challenge lies in the structural and organisational barriers that make it difficult to deliver this consistently.
“If we are serious about rebuilding public trust and confidence, we need to focus as much on the internal conditions within policing, including organisational culture, leadership and support for officers, as we do on external expectations and multi-agency partnerships. Fixing the relationship between police and the public ultimately depends on fixing relationships within policing itself.”
He argued for a relational understanding of neighbourhood policing which focuses on the quality of relations across three dimensions:
- interpersonal relations through fair, transparent, and respectful interactions between frontline police and members of the public;
- organisational relations between senior police leaders, supervisors and the frontline that are internally perceived as fair and respectful; and
- partnership relations in terms of how well police connect with relevant community, public, business and third sector partners within the wider community safety ecosystem.
Looking ahead, the research calls for a more open conversation with the public about what policing can realistically deliver under current conditions, alongside renewed debate within policing about priorities, values and ways of working. Without such changes, the gap between expectations and delivery may continue to widen, with significant consequences for legitimacy and confidence.
The findings form part of the Centre’s ongoing work on the Minimum Policing Standard research project, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and contribute to national debates about the future role of policing in increasingly complex social landscapes.