Editorial

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

We do not need to remind readers of this journalthat the police are the most visible domestic agentsof coercive governmental authority in advancedliberal democracies. What the public thinks, feels,and says about the police and the stance of citizenstoward the police can, in many respects, stand as akey indicator of confidence in the state’s ability tofulfil its side of the social contract. And of courselevels of public confidence in the police haveknock-on effects for every part of the criminal jus-tice process. In recent years, in anglophonejurisdictions, the issue of public confidence in thepolice has, in a number of guises and for a varietyof reasons, gradually moved up the political agen-da. Public sensibilities increasingly govern thepolitics of policing. There is a consensus that thechallenge for the police, in line with all public ser-vices, is to respond effectively to the conflictingdemands and needs of an increasingly complex so-ciety and demanding citizenry. In England andWales, as Neyroud (2009) has observed, the issueof localization has ‘emerged again’ as part of thecommitment to giving service users both morechoice over the services they use and more sayabout service provision (see also McLaughlin,2005). This has occurred not only in the contextof political party rhetoric, but in the move away

from the myriad of quantitative performance indi-cators relating to police performance to anannouncement in March 2009 that the Britishgovernment was abolishing the bulk of top-downtargets apart from a 60% ‘public confidence’ targetto be met by 2012. The target was part of the ‘Polic-ing Pledge’ introduced in 2008, detailing what thepublic 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 publicconfidence and ‘Policing Pledge’. The focus willnow be on outcomes rather than meeting centrallydictated processes. The police now find themselvescaught between a rock and a hard place. In an era ofserious cutbacks, a new realism dictates that thecommitment to resource intensive neighbourhoodpolicing may be unsustainable. However, if the newgovernment bolsters police accountability at a locallevel, someone is going to have to explain why thepolice broke such a highly publicized pledge. Con-firmation that ‘pledges’ and ‘commitments’ are littlemore than short-term political gimmicks meansthat issues of public trust and confidence will beonce more to the fore. Rather than fade away, these

*E-mail: [email protected], Volume 4, Number 3, pp. 199–202doi: 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 througha system of accountability premised upon electoralpopulism.

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

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

[original emphasis] (O ’Connor,2010).

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

There is no paucity of literature addressing theissues of public confidence and trust in policingeither in the UK or elsewhere (for an overview,see Rix et al., 2009). Indeed, it seems set to becomea fully fledged policy domain. However, there is anever present danger for those of us working on thepolice to pay too little attention to broader socio-economic drivers at work. Perhaps we need to stepback to consider the normative transformations re-sultant from the rise of a consumer culture definedby an ever increasing number of forms and sites ofmass consumption where individuals ‘experience’consumption as a project of identity formationand expression (Zukin and Maguire, 2005). A criti-cal question is whether lack of confidence and trustin governmental activities, the erosion of institu-tional authority, civil inattention, and ontologicalinsecurity are intrinsic and, to a degree, generation-ally irreversible characteristics of such societies(cf, Fukuyama, 1996; O’Neill, 2002)? What arethe implications of the disconcerting and disrup-tive logics of consumer culture for those whoseem to think that raising ‘public’ confidence inand generating positive views of the police arelargely technical matters, amenable to managementthrough target setting and the development of ‘bestpractice’ toolkits and PowerPoint presentations?

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The PapersThe papers presented in this special issue areauthored by Australian, New Zealand, and UKresearchers and practitioners working on the keyissues that define contemporary debates regardingpublic confidence in the police. The papers arediverse, covering research on police legitimacy;police officer confidence in the police and thepublic, public expectations, witnesses and victimsand minority communities, community policinginitiatives, and reports on various reform pro-grammes. They also highlight the diversity ofmethodological approach. The contributors are se-nior police practitioners and academics. Thepapers derive from two workshops sponsored bythe British Academy and the Academy of SocialSciences in Australia. The first workshop took placeat City University London in June 2009 and the sec-ond was held at the Tasmanian Institute of LawEnforcement Studies at the University of Tasmaniain Hobart, Australia in December 2009.1

The workshops brought together leading re-searchers and practitioners who have significantlyadvanced our understanding of the critical issuesrelating to public trust and confidence in the police.Its aim in doing so was to stimulate an informeddebate and inspire efforts to develop a more sophis-ticated understanding of its key components andmost complex challenges. We asked speakers andparticipants generally to consider the followingquestions:

• What evidence is there to suggest a decline inpublic confidence?

• If a decline can be evidenced what factors aredriving 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 areproduced and maintained?

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

It became clear at both workshops that ‘publicconfidence’ is a classic ‘wicked issue’—a complicatedand demanding concept to get to grips with, not leastbecause 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 increasinglyhollowed out concept in multi-pluralist, consumersocieties. Some speakers expressed the hope thatthe current focus on public confidence wouldsomehow liberate the police from the corrosiveeffects of New Public Management and allowTyler’s (2007) principles of procedural justice togenerate a New Public Service model of policing.Like several of our contributors, we remain scepticalabout this. A quick check through police force web-sites provides ample evidence that public confidencetargets have been firmly locatedwithin performancemanagement regimes and police governance.

The issue of ‘public confidence’, as was evidentin both London and Hobart, raises many morequestions than answers:

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

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

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

• How can the police reach the ‘silent constituen-cies’ who have distinctive, possibly complicatedpolicing 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 fosterconfidence?

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

lic sector reform? Are similar sets of issues drivingthis agenda in different jurisdictions? What are thelong-term implications of putting the public ‘cen-tre stage’? If we continue to address these questionsin a research context, what methodologies shouldwe use? These issues are for another conversationyet to be had. The papers in this volume provide astrong, varied, and methodologically diverse rangeof narratives that will provide a solid foundationfrom which that conversation can take place.

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

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

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

McLaughlin, E. (2005). “‘Forcing the Issue: New Labour,‘New Localism’ and the Democratic Renewal of PoliceAccountability’”. 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 theEvidence. London: Home Office Research, Developmentand 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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