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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

Tracking trajectories in public confidence in the police: a time series analysis.

Session: Social Indicators of Trust in Criminal Justice

Author:

Katy Sindall; University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Improving public confidence in policing is high on the public agenda and the focus of much policy making. Since its conception, patterns of public support and trust in the police have changed substantially, but while an abundance of research has examined the causes and consequences of citizens’ attitudes toward the police, it has primarily done so using individual-level, cross-sectional analysis, and in so doing has paid comparatively little attention to aggregate changes in confidence over time. Using the British Crime Survey over its first 25 years, and employing both descriptive and parametric time series analyses, this paper explores how trajectories in confidence in the police have evolved over time, how these evolutionary paths may differ for varying subgroups in the population and whether the relationships found between confidence and some of its key drivers at the individual, cross-sectional level, hold over the longer term.