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Understanding public confidence in the police within a changing crime landscape

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Abstract

This study tested whether Londoners’ public confidence in the Police has deteriorated in the face of numerous stark changes in crime, police workforce and media reporting and if so, which factors hold most influence. The data comes from the London Public Attitude Survey (PAS), a large-scale London-wide survey of citizen views on policing between March 2011 and March 2020—with an overall sample size of 112,000. Analytics includes time lagged cross correlations, Hidden Markov Model, Artificial neural network and permutations feature importance. Citizen confidence in the police has seen a significant reduction over recent years and the variables of knife crime, media reporting, police officer numbers and homicides were able to accurately predict the observed decline. The decline of confidence requires a considered effort to address given the potential detrimental consequences of a society without it.

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Data availability

Most Datasets (all the crime and public perception) analysed during the current study are available in the London Data Store repository (London Datastore—Greater London Authority). The data on police workforce and Sanction detections are published on the Metropolitan Police Services ‘stats and data’ website https://www.met.police.uk/sd/stats-and-data/. The data generated on media articles via https://www.newswhip.com was collected specially for the research. The data set are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, London, UK

    Paul Dawson, Nicole Ramshaw, Emily Gilbert & Valerie Forrester

  2. Kings College, London, UK

    Nicholas Fisk & Narushige Shiode

Authors
  1. Paul Dawson
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  2. Nicholas Fisk
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  3. Nicole Ramshaw
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  4. Emily Gilbert
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  5. Narushige Shiode
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  6. Valerie Forrester
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Correspondence to Paul Dawson.

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On behalf of all of the authors, the correspondence author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Dawson, P., Fisk, N., Ramshaw, N. et al. Understanding public confidence in the police within a changing crime landscape. SN Soc Sci 3, 198 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00784-7

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