This panel will explore what the public think the core functions of the police are. Drawing on different methodological approaches, presentations will analyse what members of the public think local policing is for, what they want from the police, and what they think police should do in responding to people with vulnerabilities. Presentations will draw empirical research findings from the Minimum Policing Standards project at the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre.

Police in England and Wales are under growing pressure to respond to multiple demands, with budgets and capabilities failing to keep pace. Alongside this, public scandals and wrongdoing in policing is regularly revealed, debated and fed into reform programmes. Recognising these issues, we ask what members of the public really want from policing. Inspired by research that developed a Minimum Income Standard, the study aims to establish consensus on a set of activities and services that the police should be able to provide to everyone - a ‘minimum policing standard.’ Three iterative rounds of focus groups conducted in four UK locations revealed broad agreement on the importance of responding to local problems, neighbourhood police presence and engagement and fair treatment, all of which were observed to be lacking. Generic crime priority lists were not seen to be useful for thinking about how police should respond to and protect communities. While participants emphasised the need for police to ‘pass things on’ to services better placed to provide solutions to problems such as drug misuse or homelessness, there was general agreement that an initial police response is necessary where risk of harm presents. Nonetheless, opinions that the police should not be involved beyond first response in cases of threat to safety where no crime has been committed indicated a perceived boundary for police intervention. In conclusion, our research reveals considerable social consensus on what service police should provide and a minimum standard to which a police service should adhere.

Opinion surveys have been probing public views of the police for more than half a century. In the UK, especially, a wealth of data generated over many years has demonstrated the waxing and waning of ‘trust and confidence’ in police. Yet, many of the survey questions currently used to measure these and related constructs are essentially legacies of earlier efforts. This has benefits in maintaining consistent time series, but risks missing developments in the way people thinking about police. In this paper we present results from a representative survey of England, Scotland and Wales that fielded items, developed through a series of focus groups, that define a ‘minimum policing standard’ – a set of services to local communities people think police simply should, under normal conditions, be able to provide. We show, first, that few respondents felt police are meeting these standards. Public views of policing are currently marked by high levels of uncertainty, disappointment, and disillusion. Second, scales developed from these items prove to be very strong predictors of key indices of public opinion used in policing studies, and indeed in police performance management, including trust, confidence and legitimacy. Third, we are able to show how different aspects of police performance – or at least people’s judgements of it – feed into these indices. In particular, visibility and ‘presence’ seem to be more important for confidence in police, while fairness and proportionality are far more important for legitimacy.

When confronted with situations locally that carry potential risk to safety of self or other, the public is faced with the question: ‘should I call the police?’ These situations include presentations of public disorder, aggressive behaviour, or people acting strangely. That such situations may involve vulnerable people, such as children and those with mental health problems, complicates the matter and raises the issue of whether the police are the appropriate service to respond. This paper explores public thresholds for calling the police, how the police should respond to potentially vulnerable people, and whether the police or other services are seen as the appropriate service in responding in such situations. Through a series of focus groups, members of the public were presented with different scenarios invoking vulnerability through depictions of disorderly behaviour and suspicious activity. To explore thresholds for recourse to emergency services, for each scenario variables indicative of vulnerability were iteratively escalated and respondents offered a number of possible responses, including calling the police or contacting other services. With this relatively simple premise, we were able to engage participants in a rich discussion concerning their own reactions along with expectations and the role of the police at a local level. Our findings show that the public wants and expects the police to respond in an immediate sense when situations identified as presenting risk occur, while also agreeing that follow up intervention from more specialised services is necessary.