Crime Story

Robert Bain looks at how research is helping the police get to know its public, in a bid to strengthen communities and drive down crime

Whatever your views on policing, most people can agree that it isn't like it used to be. Chasing and catching criminals is no longer seen as enough, and an increasing number of police forces are turning to a new approach of community involvement and reassurance – with research at its heart.

Community policing is not just about how safe we are but how safe we feel. Despite a steady fall in crime rates in the UK, public perception of the threat of crime has crept stubbornly up and up over the past decade. For a long time, this was nothing more than a headache for politicians at election time, but now, efforts to narrow this "reassurance gap" have been put at the centre of the country's policing strategy. Policymakers have begun to realise that, just like in the world of marketing, the success of a police force is to a great extent driven by how the public perceive it.

The reasoning is that people's view of how safe they are and how well the police is performing is fuelled by certain types of crime, identified by Surrey University policing expert Martin Innes as "signal crimes". These are visible signs of disorder like graffiti, drug abuse and reckless driving, that make people feel unsafe. The public get the message that they are safer staying indoors, and the criminals get the message that they own the streets.

Community policing – an approach implemented with great success in the 1990s in places including the Netherlands and Chicago – aims to halt this vicious cycle. In Chicago, a steadily rising crime rate was reversed and violent crime reduced by 19% in the five years after the introduction of community policing in 1993. It's about changing people's perceptions by building better relationships between police forces and the communities they serve – which is where research comes in.


The causes of crime
In Oldham in the north of England, the move to community policing was triggered by riots in 2001, in which police were attacked by gangs of youths with petrol bombs, resulting in 92 officers being injured. "You do not get better and clearer feedback than people rioting and trashing your police vehicles," says retired Chief Supt Keith Bentley, former divisional commander at Oldham. "It's pretty clear that something is wrong, and something needs to be done."

The official report into the unrest highlighted "deep-rooted" racial segregation, poor public services and poor relations between communities and police. It listed 17 recommendations for Oldham's police, calling for it to become more "community-focused". It was hoped that research could help the force get the feedback it needed without waiting for people to riot.

Groningen police department in the Netherlands offered an example of research being used successfully as part of a community approach to crime prevention. The force has been conducting telephone research since 1992, and has recently moved to online surveys, using data analysis systems made by SPSS. Research project leader Johan Huizing says: "Public safety was seen as the domain of the police only, but we found that promoting safety was also a question for the local community and local authorities. This research helped enormously in bringing together the local community, local authority and the police, to work together and look for common problems."

In Oldham, the response to the 2001 riots involved setting up similar research mechanisms. The district became a trial site for the National Reassurance Policing Programme – part of a wider raft of reforms that has brought thousands of police community support officers (PCSOs) to the streets, and introduced anti-social behaviour orders to tackle low-level disorder.


Lines of enquiry
Research is handled by an in-house management information unit. Police officers and PCSOs have handed out thousands of questionnaires to discover people's concerns and expectations about their neighbourhood and the police. It's a major operation – the force is on track to deliver a questionnaire to every one of the area's 90,000 homes by March, with smaller surveys conducted on a continuous basis.

The surveys, created and processed using SPSS' Dimensions package, had to be paper-based due to low computer literacy in the area, and were conducted in English, Bangla, Urdu and Punjabi to cover all the area's ethnic groups. So far the response rate stands at 23% – an enviable figure to a commercial researcher.

Interviews with residents are also carried out by PCSOs in mobile police stations, to identify hot spots for crime and anti-social behaviour. Touch screen and GIS (geographic information systems) technology allow respondents to pinpoint the exact street corners, underpasses and dark alleys where they know there are problems.

Surveys and interviews are backed up by regular public meetings and networks linking police officers with key figures in the community. This gives the public the chance to have their say on the police's performance and gives officers regular contact with representatives who keep them informed of local events and concerns.

It's all part of a "joined-up package" of neighbourhood policing, which also encompasses a greater public presence from police officers and PCSOs, more community sentences for offenders, and the empowerment of community members to deal with minor problems themselves before they become serious. As Bentley puts it: "It's not about the police having solutions, because generally the police do not have the solutions."

The aims of this research for the police are to gather feedback and intelligence. "You're trying to detect crime, but within the scope of that you have to reassure the public that this event isn't a sign that law and order has failed in their neighbourhood," says Bentley.

By putting these research methods into practice on a large scale, the police are able to draw from them another benefit: reassuring the public that their views are being taken seriously. This is achieved not through gathering information but through conducting – and being seen to conduct – the research itself. While market researchers are content with the views of a sample of members of the public, police researchers want to hear from them all. As a result, people sense that the police care about their concerns.

Bentley says this is particularly important in the aftermath of a serious crime: "The police and the local authorities have got to get out there quickly to look for support, look for witnesses and to give reassurance that things are being taken seriously, and that there's a serious job being done."


Duly reassured
Research as part of reassurance policing might at first seem like a plea for votes – a costly way of giving the public what they think they want, rather than what they really need. The reason it works is that how safe people feel affects how they act, and determines how the entire community operates.

The Home Office's evaluation of the National Reassurance Policing Programme last year found that real and perceived rates of crime and anti-social behaviour had fallen in test areas, and that feelings of safety and confidence in the police had significantly improved.

If law-abiding residents cower behind their net curtains and don't want to get to know their neighbours, they are handing control of their community to criminals. By using research to get to know their neighbourhoods, police are making their own job easier by giving communities the means and the confidence to take control for themselves. And there's no better deterrent to crime than a strong community.

February | 2007