Helping them with their enquiries

The challenge
The long-standing gap in recorded customer satisfaction levels between the white population and black and minority ethnic (BME) groups is one of the great concerns for police forces in England and Wales. The reasons for this discrepancy, as well as its size, vary between and sometimes within police authorities.

”One of the things we learned from the research is that on its own a fast response just doesn’t do it. There are broader issues involved in the confidence that customers feel with local police”

Mick Day, Surrey Police

Surrey Police employs around 4,500 people, including nearly 2,000 frontline officers, who serve a population of just over a million. Like other forces it is obliged to collect data on customer satisfaction levels from people who have been the victims of crime, covering action taken, ease of contact, keeping people informed, treatment and overall satisfaction. Although the sample of BME respondents is small in any one month, the gap between their levels of customer satisfaction and white people’s is persistent over time.

It was because of this that Surrey Police asked a team from Roehampton University’s Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (Cronem) to examine the issue. The force also decided to include the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) population and the disabled, to provide a more complete picture.

The brief
To find out what we could about the nature of the customer satisfaction gap between the different communities and populations in Surrey, and to recommend what could be done to narrow or eliminate it.

The approach
We settled on a two-stranded methodology. The first strand consisted of interviewing people who had been the victims of crime in the previous 12 months. Thirty-three interviews with respondents from different ethnic groups were completed. We selected 23 different locations to tease out any differences between respondents in urban and rural areas. We were careful to get a balance of men and women as well as those from different age groups.

We had no trouble recruiting respondents. People who have been caught up in crimes and other types of incidents often have interesting and sometimes disturbing stories to tell. Giving an account to a researcher becomes a way of getting it off one’s chest.

The second strand of the project consisted of running focus groups to establish similarities and differences in perceptions of Surrey Police and its methods among the ethnic and other groups in the county. We ran seven groups, involving six to eight participants from white British, south Asian and black African populations.

BME respondents were found through relevant community and voluntary organisations. White respondents were recruited on housing estates in two locations in the county using local contacts made by the researcher who ran the group.

Because the LGBT population is scattered across the county, we opted for individual interviews.

We tried to be as creative as possible, conducting semi-structured interviews and using techniques more often seen when researching commercial brands. This was especially important when establishing what visual associations and verbal concepts were linked to the police.

The key discovery we made using these techniques was that there were significant differences between members of higher and lower socio-economic groups, as well as younger people, in the accuracy of their ‘conceptual maps’ regarding the police service. Middle-class respondents from all ethnic groups drew a distinction between the police and Surrey Police, but younger respondents and those from lower socio-economic groups typically operated with a simple, general concept of ‘the police’.

We also employed ethnographic observation to good effect. The vast majority of interviews with victims of crime were conducted in respondents’ homes, so it was possible to gain invaluable insights into their lives - for example, the types of houses and flats in which they lived, their neighbourhoods, where they shopped and the presence or absence of signs of anti-social behaviour and vandalism.

Those of us who conducted focus groups also spent time getting to know the neighbourhoods, striking up casual conversations with local shoppers, shopkeepers and café and restaurant workers to help confirm what we had learned from the focus groups. This fieldwork generated a wealth of invaluable contextual data.

The findings
Our recommendations included improving cultural awareness training so that officers have a greater understanding of the dynamics of different BME communities. Training would need to cover social hierarchies, gender differences, age seniority and how these factors frame interaction between police personnel and the public. We also emphasised the importance attached to a free or low-cost non-emergency phone number for those in lower socio-economic groups, the need to avoid a macho style of frontline policing whenever possible, and the importance of a smooth handover when changes in personnel take place, so that the social relationship between the police and the people they serve is maintained.

When using technologies such as the internet and mobile phones as ways of connecting with the public, we advised that care be taken not to exclude older people, especially those from lower socio-economic groups, who made it clear they felt left out if they could not access services.

Another insight was that the response time to crimes and other incidents was only a part of how customer satisfaction was defined. As Mick Day, head of the diversity directorate of Surrey Police, says: “One of the things we learned from the research is that on its own a fast response just doesn’t do it. There are broader issues involved in the confidence that customers feel with the local police. Some of these, like the interaction between officers and members of the public, are under our control, but others like images of the police they get from the media and TV programmes like CSI are often not.”

A key finding was that an increase in the number of ethnic minority personnel in the force would almost certainly lead to a rise in satisfaction levels among BME groups.

The outcome
The force has set itself the target of increasing the proportion of officers from BME groups from 3.8% to 4.5%.

It is also working to increase the number of touchpoints it has with the public. “We are going to revive the open day for our customers at our headquarters in Guildford this summer,” said Day. Other options that might increase awareness of the Surrey Police brand are being examined. Some larger police authorities use jingles on commercial radio stations - the Metropolitan Police use the sound bite ‘Working together for a safer London’, for example. “We’re looking at it but no decision has been made yet,” said Day.

Like other police forces Surrey Police will soon restructure its services in the drive for efficiency savings. “We are now very conscious that if some of the larger police stations in Surrey are to be closed we will want to provide smaller, alternative facilities in places like local government offices so that members of the local community can make contact with us easily,” says Day.

Many of the recommendations from the research project have been fed into Surrey Police’s proposed equality, diversity and human rights strategy. The findings, some of which have national policy implications, have been shared with other police forces in England, and with the Scottish Government.