“Trust is easier to corrode than it is to build.”
As part of our Campaign for Social Science events programme, last week we held a webinar featuring Professor Jyoti Belur and Professor Martin Innes FAcSS, who discussed the challenges and potential solutions of building trust in the police.
In the webinar, chaired by Dr Rick Muir, Director of the Police Foundation, our panellists offered their insights and perspectives on increasing legitimacy, the growing use of AI and the importance of neighbourhood policing to public perceptions of the police.
Professor Jyoti Belur, of University College London, began by explaining how the direction of travel for addressing the lack of resources and other challenges being faced by police institutions the world over is focused on technological solutions, including in big data, AI and predictive models and algorithms. However, Jyoti highlighted her concerns on a seeming reluctance to examine more critically whether such solutions might be perpetuating or worsening existing inequalities resulting in worse outcomes for some parts of society. She said, “An algorithm is only as good as the data that goes into its making and evidence has indicated that this would often be problematic and inequitable in nature.”
Jyoti then moved on to explore how the perceived solution to the public trust crisis is anchored to the legitimacy of policing. She said, “The more effective the police are going to be, the more legitimate they are going to be considered. The more legitimate that they are will automatically improve public trust.” But she argued that the police weren’t identifying the cause of the lack of, or reduction in, public trust and that this needed to be examined to find appropriate solutions.
Jyoti went on to discuss the idea of culture and how it dominates the behaviour practiced by organisations, in this instance the police, and it is this behaviour that the public is dissatisfied with. She then went on to explore some potential solutions with a focus on community policing and procedural justice being key. She said, “Procedural justice might address most of these concerns, but it requires a culture change. Evidence indicates that the ethos of procedural justice cannot be transmitted merely through a two-day training programme, and cannot be layered on top of business as usual. These principles need to be sustained and nourished by organisational culture and values.”
Jyoti then went on to explain how organisational justice was interconnected with procedural justice and that when police officers perceive themselves to be treated fairly by the organisation, this in turn improves their job satisfaction, commitment to trust and transparency, and their self-legitimacy.
Professor Martin Innes FAcSS, of the Security, Crime & Intelligence Innovation Institute at Cardiff University, built on Jyoti’s points by first explaining how public distrust is a challenge faced not only by the police but a range of public institutions. He also commented on how public distrust in the police and misinformation is not a new phenomenon and used the example of the first record of public mistrust in information being provided by the government and authorities dated back to 1601 during the English civil war. But Martin did highlight how the environment and context within which information is spread is much changed.
He said, “What is unique about disinformation and misinformation at the moment is the technological and information environment in which it is operating, which allows it to travel further and faster.”
Martin then went on to draw on his own research on how the public understand and attribute meaning to issues of crime and policing. He highlighted how he believes that the public are less likely to use aggregate trends in the number of police or crime rates over time as their measure of understanding these issues and instead it was ‘signal crimes’, which are events which change how people think feel or act in relation to their security, which drives their understanding in relation to these.
Martin said, “I would like to suggest that actually that idea of there being these signal crimes, or signal events, absolutely helps us interpret and understand why these particular scandals and crises within policing are registering and are so resonant with so many people, because what they demonstrate or evidence is a sense in which social control is provided by the police is failing them, is not there, is ineffective, or is not being delivered in an appropriate kind of manner.”
He identified that visibility, accessibility and familiarity were all key factors in increasing trust in the police and that research with local communities had found that focusing on these principles in neighbourhood policing and addressing local problems first increased feelings of safety in the community and therefore trust in local police forces.
Martin said, “It’s in solving the issues, problems and frictions that people have on an everyday basis in their neighbourhood that I think starts to take some of the ground in and allow more pro-social forces to exert their influence in terms of how people feel about both their neighbourhood, the safety of their families, but also the broader world around them.”
Watch the recording below to hear more from our speakers.
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