What does it mean when we ask the public if they are ‘confident’ in policing? The trust, fairness, presence model of ‘public confidence’
| Author | Basit Javid,Ben Bradford,Kevin Morrell |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1461355719891197 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
What does it mean when we ask the
public if they are ‘confident’ in policing?
The trust, fairness, presence model
of ‘public confidence’
Kevin Morrell
Durham University, UK
Ben Bradford
UCL Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science London, UK
Basit Javid
West Midlands Police Birmingham, UK
Abstract
‘Confidence’ is widely taken to be a cru cial measure of the r elationship be tween citizens and public services such as
policing. It is acknowledged that confidence is multifaceted and hard to measure, but often discussions are based on one
‘headline’ rating of a single item, for instance: ‘What is your level of confidence in ...’. The subsequent focus for
research is explaining what might drive ‘confidence’, or what it might predict. We are interested in a more fundamental
question: what does it mean when we ask the public if they are ‘confident’ in policing? To answer this, we analyse
extensive and detailed survey data specifically designed to measure public confidence, within the jurisdiction of a UK
police force – West Midlands Police. We develop then validate a three-part model of confidence as trust, fairness and
presence, and find good evidence to support this model across different waves of the survey. This extends existing
literature with implications for policy.
Keywords
Confidence, public, trust, fairness, procedural justice
The question of public confidence is widely relevant
because it takes us to the heart of the relationship between
citizens and public institutions (Cook and Gronke, 2005;
Miao et al., 2014). ‘Public confidence’ has been used to
describe attitudes in relation to: European Union (EU) cri-
sis management institutions (Pe rsson et al., 2017); U.K.
policies on business (Linsley et al., 2016), asylum (Bos-
well, 2015) and local government (James and Moseley,
2014); various branches of state government in the USA
(Kelleher and Wolak, 2007); the Supreme Court (Caldeira,
1986) and lower courts (Benesh, 2006); Congress and the
White House (Ladd and Bowman, 1998); social security
(Cook et al., 2010) and other U.S. institutions (Cook and
Gronke, 2005). There are long-standing concerns about
declining confidence across institutions by the American
public (Heise, 1985; Lipset and Schneider, 1983), and these
concerns are shared across Europe (Eriksson, 2012), and
Canada and Japan, as shown in the World Values Surveys
(see Pharr and Putnam, 2000). In these settings, confidence
is often measured with a single item.
1
‘Public confidence’ is a concern in the context of poli-
cing because the public are a key source of help and infor-
mation. It is also important in any society that the public
Corresponding author:
Kevin Morrell, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LB, UK.
Email: kevin.morrell@durham.ac.uk
International Journalof
Police Science & Management
2020, Vol. 22(2) 111–122
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1461355719891197
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