Crime – perception or reality
We’re in the process of carrying out a 25 question community survey to the 5500 homes within my County area. We’re about half way through both rural and more urban areas and the way we are physically collecting the completed questionnaires means that, so far, the return rate is around 31% overall. So, not bad and I think enough to make it representative.
I’ll write more about the different areas covered once the survey is finished but data so far suggests there is indeed a problem with people’s perception of crime. For some time now I’ve been concerned that the Staffordshire Police public relations campaign to reassure the public against the fear of crime is, in fact, having the opposite effect. I’ve raised concerns in committee and to very senior police officers.
I’m a big supporter of the police and the increasingly difficult job they do but clearly they disagree or are less concerned on this particular issue and, if anything, the PR machine is doing even more of the same. I’ve never seen so many police driven stories in the newspapers as over the last six months. Official figures from the police, and I know that figures are open to question nowadays (particularly around anti social behaviour, but I’ll write about my findings on that in due course), suggest that crime in Staffordshire is falling overall. And I do believe that in comparison to many areas of the country Lichfield district and Staffordshire, generally, do have lower rates of crime. So that begs the question, why do 71% of people completing the questionnaires so far think that crime is rising?
I’m concerned that the enormous effort the police are putting in to promoting their statistical ‘wins’ is actually causing more people to worry about crime. It is self perpetuating… the police constantly hammering their ‘doing well’ message is, I believe, worrying people who normally give relatively little thought to crime in their everyday lives. Yes, most people are aware of the issues in the country as a whole, and particularly in some of our inner cities, but the approach of constantly pushing the ‘doing well’ message on street corners, in newspapers and in police publications we get to our homes so often now brings the fear of crime much closer to local people and accentuates a problem which isn’t as great as they now think. Anti social behaviour is a separate issue and, as I said earlier, I’ll write about my findings on that subject shortly.
But something is causing 71% of people to think crime is rising in Staffordshire and something is also causing over 60% of people who completed questionnaires so far to have ‘little confidence’ in the police. This when the latest stats from the police themselves suggest that 82% of people questioned in their surveys are delighted with them. Something is making the fear of crime a bigger issue than it should be and the anomaly between the official police survey and my findings in public confidence needs understanding!
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5 comments
It’s the age old problem of gathering information from only the element of Public who wish to participate in the survey. I wonder what the true response would be if 100% of the survey questionaires were to be returned. Then you’d have to factor out the personal effect where an individual may feel crime is all around them but it is not in real terms, and those who have not reported a crime as they feel either nothing will done about it or they feel te crime in this day & age is petty.
Regards
Mr Ellis,
We live in an area of Lichfield which has only recently started to have problems with anti social behaviour. Not experienced it before but it is becoming a more regular issue of late.
We recently met a support officer and a proper constable following a call from one of our neighbours to the police over our recent problems.
They do appear to talk the talk and I genuinely believe that they believed what they were telling us. In reality, it strikes me that they deal with problems on a daily basis and have become somewhat immune from the views of joe public.
I haven’t seen the questionnaire yet and I don’t know precisely how you phrased the question of confidence but from recent experience I fear I would have to answer the question as having little confidence in their ability to deal with our local problem. I’m not saying they’re not bothered just that they have a different perspective to the public.
The problem is the police are becoming experts of spin themselves. They are in an environment which is statistics driven and worse still as those stats are based more on the perception of people the police are always going try to protect themselves by aiming at improving their reputation with the general public. They aren’t very subtle about it and the public at large whilst broadly supportive of the police trust them less and less because they don’t believe what the police themselves are saying. I agree, Matthew, it is self perpetuating and the police need to go back to being an enforcement service and less political with a small p.
The problem is not helped when you see reports of chief constables being told off because they have a procedure in place that all people that report a crime are seen by an officer. This must mean that most areas have policies saying they will not respond to ‘unimportant’ reports. To the person reporting the crime it is always inportant and they want more than just a crime number.
Unfortunately this is a consequence of the endless targets and if your crime is not on the list for a target the temptation must be there to do the minimum.
I suggest the problem is twofold.
First, people’s perceptions often are far removed from the facts of a topic. If you wish to deal with people’s problems you need to address their perceptions rather than the facts. This may be why some people believe that the police are out of touch with them.
Second, it may depend upon the questions posed to the public. If you ask “could the police do more about crime?”, you are likely to receive an overwhelming “yes” response. If you ask instead “what more could the police do about crime?”, the response is likely to be much lower and muted, and consist of little more than “put more police on the beat”.
That last, commonly voiced suggestion will continue until we have a policeman on every street corner – a fantasy that I regret the force is stuck with permanently.
We get a good response from the police in this village. My only suggestion for improving police v public relationships is not that the police do more but that they tell us what they are doing in specific cases. If they are sending out more patrols following a reported potential problem, tell us that they are doing so. And if they are not going to send someone out to investigate a crime or incident, tell us why. In my experience there has always been a good reason, eg there is no evidence to investigate, but if we hear nothing we assume that nothing is being done. To be effective this would call for a network of comminicators in each community. Not difficult to arrange, I suggest.
I am delighted that our own Chief Constable is reducing the admin burden on officers in order to get more of them onto the ground.
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