Victims’ perceptions of police services: The perspectives of tourists as outsiders
| Author | Rob I Mawby,Mine Ozascilar |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557211064047 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
Victims’perceptions of police services:
The perspectives of tourists as outsiders
Rob I Mawby
Harper Adams University College, UK
Mine Ozascilar
Bahcesehir Universitesi, Turkey
Abstract
This article presents the first research to consider perceptions of the police held by non-resident victims, in this case US
citizens on holiday either at home or abroad. Based on a small sample of 84 US residents victimised while holidaying in
either the USA or four other countries, and drawn from Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform, it is, essen-
tially exploratory. However, the findings suggest that tourist victims in our sample commonly reported their crimes and
held extremely positive views of the way they were treated by the police, indeed more so than their experiences ‘back
home’had led them to expect. Most victims, nevertheless, said they would have appreciated more support, from the
police and other sources. Although more research is needed to build on this study, the findings do underline the
need for a greater focus on the experiences of foreign visitors and offer a template for future research on outsiders’
views of their experiences as victims.
Keywords
Tourist victims, policing tourism, foreign visitors’perceptions of police, reporting decisions, evaluations of police
response, cross-national comparisons
Submitted 1 Dec 2020, Revise received 21 Jul 2021, accepted 21 Jul 2021
Introduction
Comparative research on perceptions of the police
Although research on the police and evaluations of police
performance have become commonplace, much of this
focuses on individual countries. This is scarcely surprising.
Despite the dramatic growth in cross-national research on
police and policing, comparing different policing systems
is a complex and costly enterprise. Thus studies tend to
depend on either secondary analysis of broader inter-
national surveys like the International Crime Victim
Survey (ICVS) (van Dijk et al., 2008; van Kesteren and
van Dijk, 2010), the European Values Studies or the
European Social Survey (Schaap, 2018) and the World
Values Survey.
1
However, all this tells us is what citizens
in one country think of their own police. To date, no
research –as far as we are aware –has considered either
non-residents’views of the police compared with the
police ‘back home’or the perceptions that citizens of one
country have of the police in different countries.
Where respondents are asked to evaluate their own
police systems, at least two approaches have been
adopted, albeit these are not mutually exclusive. First, citi-
zens may be asked about their general perceptions of the
police, perhaps linking this to contacts they have had with
Corresponding author:
Rob I Mawby, Rural Crime Centre, Harper Adams University College,
Newport TF10 8NB, UK.
Email: professorrobmawby@hotmail.com
Original Research Article
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2022, Vol. 24(2) 103–112
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14613557211064047
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