CJPS3

Editorial

‘The Public gets what the Public wants?’ Interrogating the ‘Public Confidence’ Agenda Jenny Fleming* and Eugene McLaughlin

We do not need to remind readers of this journal that the police are the most visible domestic agents of coercive governmental authority in advanced liberal democracies. What the public thinks, feels, and says about the police and the stance of citizens toward the police can, in many respects, stand as a key indicator of confidence in the state’s ability to fulfil its side of the social contract. And of course levels of public confidence in the police have knock-on effects for every part of the criminal jus- tice process. In recent years, in anglophone jurisdictions, the issue of public confidence in the police has, in a number of guises and for a variety of reasons, gradually moved up the political agen- da. Public sensibilities increasingly govern the politics of policing. There is a consensus that the challenge for the police, in line with all public ser- vices, is to respond effectively to the conflicting demands and needs of an increasingly complex so- ciety and demanding citizenry. In England and Wales, as Neyroud (2009) has observed, the issue of localization has ‘emerged again’ as part of the commitment to giving service users both more choice over the services they use and more say about service provision (see also McLaughlin, 2005). This has occurred not only in the context of political party rhetoric, but in the move away

from the myriad of quantitative performance indi- cators relating to police performance to an announcement in March 2009 that the British government was abolishing the bulk of top-down targets apart from a 60% ‘public confidence’ target to be met by 2012. The target was part of the ‘Polic- ing Pledge’ introduced in 2008, detailing what the public should expect from the police at both the na- tional and local level. In O’Connor’s (2010) words, the British public, in the context of police perfor- mance, would now be put ‘centre stage’. However, in June 2010 the new coalition government an- nounced that it was abolishing both the public confidence and ‘Policing Pledge’. The focus will now be on outcomes rather than meeting centrally dictated processes. The police now find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. In an era of serious cutbacks, a new realism dictates that the commitment to resource intensive neighbourhood policing may be unsustainable. However, if the new government bolsters police accountability at a local level, someone is going to have to explain why the police broke such a highly publicized pledge. Con- firmation that ‘pledges’ and ‘commitments’ are little more than short-term political gimmicks means that issues of public trust and confidence will be once more to the fore. Rather than fade away, these

*E-mail: [email protected] Policing, Volume 4, Number 3, pp. 199–202 doi: 10.1093/police/paq024 © The Authors 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSF Associates: Publius, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected]

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‘wicked issues’may even be fully politicized through a system of accountability premised upon electoral populism.

In the Australasian context, both Australia and New Zealand have sought to engage the confidence of communities and in putting these communities ‘centre stage’ have sought to determine what they want and expect of their police. In New Zealand, national public research into the needs and wants of New Zealand citizens helped inform the devel- opment of new policing legislation in New Zealand. In Australia, where eight police jurisdic- tions manage their citizens in their own way, there is still common ground to be identified in an ongoing concern with customer service, the need to engender and improve public confidence, particularly in ‘hard to reach groups’, to identify security concerns, and to build trust. And this when public opinion surveys across the country consistently report high levels of support for and confidence in police (Fleming and Grabosky, 2009). This has not been helped by government efforts to manage and spin the official crime sta- tistics, suggestions that an uneducated public is rejecting the reality of good news crime statistics, and demands that the public recognize the con- straints on police. In addition, there has been the highly damaging ritualistic adoption by the police of policies and practices that are intended to convey the impression of reform. Yet how can we feed a public appetite that is ‘selective, not comprehensive’ (O’Connor, 2010). How do we ensure that the pub- lic gets what the public wants? In England and Wales, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary have been set the task of ‘inspecting policing’ in the public interest:

We have adopted an ‘outside-in’ ap- proach, as opposed to the ‘inside-out’ of the past. By ‘outside-in’, I mean putting the public centre stage. We start with their questions, their under- standing, and their concerns … we are anchoring our work to public need

[original emphasis] (O ’Connor, 2010).

It could be argued of course that by raising such expectations and encouraging the growing sense of their own importance, the public will become insa- tiable and unable to be placated. The challenge facing the police today is how you engage positively with the community, earn their confidence and trust, reassure the many publics that you have ev- erything under control (and at the same time discourage prospective offenders) without elevat- ing expectations to unreachable heights? How do police provide a quality and responsive service to their ‘customers’ while at the same time reducing the appetite for services without damaging confi- dence levels (Fleming and Grabosky, 2009)?

There is no paucity of literature addressing the issues of public confidence and trust in policing either in the UK or elsewhere (for an overview, see Rix et al., 2009). Indeed, it seems set to become a fully fledged policy domain. However, there is an ever present danger for those of us working on the police to pay too little attention to broader socio- economic drivers at work. Perhaps we need to step back to consider the normative transformations re- sultant from the rise of a consumer culture defined by an ever increasing number of forms and sites of mass consumption where individuals ‘experience’ consumption as a project of identity formation and expression (Zukin and Maguire, 2005). A criti- cal question is whether lack of confidence and trust in governmental activities, the erosion of institu- tional authority, civil inattention, and ontological insecurity are intrinsic and, to a degree, generation- ally irreversible characteristics of such societies (cf, Fukuyama, 1996; O’Neill, 2002)? What are the implications of the disconcerting and disrup- tive logics of consumer culture for those who seem to think that raising ‘public’ confidence in and generating positive views of the police are largely technical matters, amenable to management through target setting and the development of ‘best practice’ toolkits and PowerPoint presentations?

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The Papers The papers presented in this special issue are authored by Australian, New Zealand, and UK researchers and practitioners working on the key issues that define contemporary debates regarding public confidence in the police. The papers are diverse, covering research on police legitimacy; police officer confidence in the police and the public, public expectations, witnesses and victims and minority communities, community policing initiatives, and reports on various reform pro- grammes. They also highlight the diversity of methodological approach. The contributors are se- nior police practitioners and academics. The papers derive from two workshops sponsored by the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. The first workshop took place at City University London in June 2009 and the sec- ond was held at the Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia in December 2009.1

The workshops brought together leading re- searchers and practitioners who have significantly advanced our understanding of the critical issues relating to public trust and confidence in the police. Its aim in doing so was to stimulate an informed debate and inspire efforts to develop a more sophis- ticated understanding of its key components and most complex challenges. We asked speakers and participants generally to consider the following questions:

• What evidence is there to suggest a decline in public confidence?

• If a decline can be evidenced what factors are driving it?

• How is the issue of public confidence being un- derstood from an organizational perspective?

• What is being done to address the issue?

• Do we have examples of how exactly con- fidence and trust in public institutions are produced and maintained?

• How is the issue of ‘public confidence’ being understood across the different jurisdictions?

It became clear at both workshops that ‘public confidence’ is a classic ‘wicked issue’—a complicated and demanding concept to get to grips with, not least because it is premised upon other tricky psycho- social concepts, namely, perceptions, sentiments, opinions, expectations, judgements, satisfaction, trust, and legitimacy. And as we suggested previ- ously, ‘the public’ is becoming an increasingly hollowed out concept in multi-pluralist, consumer societies. Some speakers expressed the hope that the current focus on public confidence would somehow liberate the police from the corrosive effects of New Public Management and allow Tyler’s (2007) principles of procedural justice to generate a New Public Service model of policing. Like several of our contributors, we remain sceptical about this. A quick check through police force web- sites provides ample evidence that public confidence targets have been firmly locatedwithin performance management regimes and police governance.

The issue of ‘public confidence’, as was evident in both London and Hobart, raises many more questions than answers:

• What are the legal implications of treating the ‘public’ not as a single entity, but as a set of distinct ‘publics’?

1 We would like to acknowledge the important role that Alison Wakefield played in the ‘The Public gets what the Public Wants’ workshops. Jenny Fleming and Alison Wakefield drafted the application together in consultation with Eugene McLaughlin and P.A.J. Waddington. When Alison moved from City University London to the University of New South Wales, Eugene McLaughlin assumed responsibility for the running of the London workshop. We would also like to thank all the participants in both workshops for contributing to the debates so enthusiastically and to our referees for responding in such a constructive and prompt manner. We would also like to thank those workshop participants who did not give papers for their important input into our deliberations.

Interrogating the ‘Public Confidence’ Agenda Editorial Policing 201

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• Who are the critical constituencies when ac- cessing ‘public’ confidence (e.g. how accurately are defined interest groups and stakeholders identified)?

• How can the police reach the ‘silent constituen- cies’ who have distinctive, possibly complicated policing needs?

• Do high or low levels of public confidence clus- ter in particular localities or neighbourhoods?

• Where do people experience policing?

• Where do people acquire knowledge and in- formation about the police?

• What is the relationship between expecta- tions, satisfaction, and confidence?

• What constitutes a realistic or unrealistic pub- lic expectation?

• To what extent does legitimacy foster confidence?

Several overarching questions that emerged in both workshops were ‘why has the issue of ‘public con- fidence’ materialized across different jurisdictions, what exactly is being measured and why are we measuring it?, and ‘what are the operational limits to the ‘public confidence’ agenda?’ Many of the pa- pers here address these questions, albeit in different ways. Yet many remain unanswered and others arise. One is still left wondering for example, how we have got from A to B—where exactly did the public confidence agenda originate? Is it just one manifestation of broader programmes of pub-

lic sector reform? Are similar sets of issues driving this agenda in different jurisdictions? What are the long-term implications of putting the public ‘cen- tre stage’? If we continue to address these questions in a research context, what methodologies should we use? These issues are for another conversation yet to be had. The papers in this volume provide a strong, varied, and methodologically diverse range of narratives that will provide a solid foundation from which that conversation can take place.

References Fleming, J, and Grabosky, P. (2009). “Managing the De-

mand for Police Services, or How to Control an Insatiable Appetite.” Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol. 3(3): 281–291.

Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press.

McLaughlin, E. (2005). “‘Forcing the Issue: New Labour, ‘New Localism’ and the Democratic Renewal of Police Accountability’”. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. 44(5): 473–489.

Neyroud, P. (2009). “Editorial: ‘Confidence and Satisfac- tion’”. Policing a Journal of Policy and Practice. 3(4): 305–306.

O’Connor, D. (2010). “‘Performance from the Outside-In’”. Policing a Journal of Policy and Practice. 4: 152–156.

O’Neill, O. (2002). A Question of Trust: the Reith Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rix, A., Joshua, F., Maguire, M., and Morton, S. (2009). Improving Public Confidence in the Police: A Review of the Evidence. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, Report 28.

Tyler, T. (ed.) (2007). Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: Inter- national Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Zukin, S., and Maguire, J.S. (2005). “Consumers and Con- sumption.” American Sociological Review. 30: 173–192.

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