And both these projects were collaborative projects. And I was collaborating with Chris, Jack and Antonio from around Europe on one of these projects.
Chris used to be on the Dphil students here. He left about a year or so ago and we started this project while he was still on his dphil here.
And I have a collaborator on the on the other experiment. That's Sara McQuaid from the University of Edinburgh.
And I have to say, in both cases I did most of the work. So in a sense, I'm taking no glory is not the right.
Well, I'm taking credit for actually a huge amount of work done by other people.
Some of this, anyway, experiments in police confidence and police legitimacy.
I'm going to start off with a bit of what could catch us is deep background to this.
Just just framing this in a couple of debates within the subject facing world peace studies, much white,
much more widely and then a bit more immediate background as to why do we care about these issues of public confidence and place such as this,
particularly in the context of Great Britain experiments?
And we're talking about what took place in England, the other took place in Scotland,
and it's at least argue that something specific about these contexts which make these kinds of exponents particularly relevant.
And is it also arguable that they may not travel particularly well to have a policing context?
I think that's something worthy of discussion.
Later on, I'm going to suggest that in Pursuit of Justice, which directly motivated one of the experiments,
I think a bit about the relationship between police and community,
the pursuit of justice model and overrides kind of themselves, motivates and then would describe the results of two experiments.
And one one was a quasi experiment on the effects of mounted police community patrols in three areas in Gloucestershire, England and in London.
And the other is a replication of a quite well known study from Australia to Queensland community engagement trial.
Q Sets that we conducted in Scotland, that's obviously the project I review.
Sarah McQueen I'm going to finish with some questions you have noticed I've lost from the title.
So the mix about a comment I had in the title of which many promises and pitfalls as many because I'm not really
qualified and I'm not that strong methodology to talk about the experimental method quite in quite that way.
I think some of the promises and pitfalls of the use of experiments in criminological contexts come out in the course of discussion.
Or at least I hope they do. So the first bit of background is this, and this really is deep background, I think.
I think what I'm talking about today, the kind of research I'm talking about today, really presupposes two things.
It presupposes that people want and at least expect at some point in the future to get democratic policing.
Obviously, that defined democratic policing in lots of lots of ways.
Most of the definitions condense around something like this. So democratic police organisations have respect for citizens rights.
They use procedural fairness, they used state of justice, they use the minimum or appropriate levels of force.
They're accountable. They're responsible to those they serve. They engage in citizen participation.
They operate in equitable ways. They're responsive to the needs of those they serve, etc., etc.
I really very least would presupposing that people want and I think it's feasible they can get this,
I think it's also possible we're presupposing that policing actually is like this, at least in some context.
For example, within the United Kingdom, the British police do meet some of these criteria, at least some of the time.
And if we were dealing with a police force in a different situation where the police find it very difficult to meet these criteria,
I think a lot of what I'm saying is they might be problematic, to say the least.
That's the first bit background. The second bit of background really leads on from that in a sense,
and that's the image of the imaginary of the ideology that surrounds policing in Great Britain.
And obviously that was once interesting in Great Britain and the United Kingdom for obvious reasons.
And this is one set of images you could construct around policing in this context.
I think then the key, if you can see that that key message is meet your neighbours.
So we were operating in a context where people can imagine,
at least imagine that the police can sometimes be their neighbours and it makes sense to kind of the police could be a
neighbours that they have something they want to have things to do that want to engage if they want to act on your priorities,
etc., etc. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the message. And of course that's not the only image of policing that exists in the United Kingdom.
Here's another set of images. These things run alongside each other always and interact with each other in complicated ways.
But nevertheless, I think it's true that there's a particular cultural resonance of policing that persists in England, Wales and Scotland.
And a lot of what I'm saying today is a sense founded on the idea that people still,
still do think about policing in something like these tanks, at least in sometimes in some places within this particular social context.
The real background out of the background motivating these studies is really a trend in both criminology
and in both policing studies and in policy circles and within police organisations themselves.
That you could say started in the 1990 that I think you could also said it started a long time before that,
and that was a specific set of concerns arose about declining public trust and confidence in the police.
And this really started to come onto the policy agenda in the late 1990s into the 2000, obviously reacted.
Two events around the time, for example, the Steve Lawrence inquiry,
but also reacting to long term historical trends are already starting to be identified.
At that time, this led to many, many different policy interventions.
We can think about reassurance, policing, neighbourhood policing, etc.,
etc. and it ultimately led to the establishment by the last Labour government of a single overarching target performance target for police in England.
Wales, which was a measure of public trust and confidence.
And police organisations were jointly and severally tasked to increase increasing public confidence across a variety of measures.
This obviously and perhaps not surprising access expert research from the WHO is now saying, if you like,
if you like another stage of this research that started in the 1990s and this work at its end
that this this concern at its outset was based around in essentially one survey question.
The survey question has been in British conservation since inception, and it's the famous question asked,
people taking everything into account how good a job do you think the police in your local area are doing?
And if we look at the trends from the British Crime Survey, this is from 1984 to 2005 six.
I think you could conclude on that basis that reports of a haemorrhage of public support for police are overstated.
You will see this language in some of the literature around this. This didn't happen.
So these bars here, if you can see this, the bar is the people rating police.
Very good. The middle part is fairly good, fairly poor.
Very poor. So most of the concern was around the decline in the proportion of people rating the police is very good stuff.
Talking about 30% in 1984 to about 50% in 2003 four.
It changed the question, what is it, 2000? Pretty slightly. No, it doesn't matter too much about that.
And at the same time, there was a decline in this very, very strong, very, very good rating.
The fairly poor and very poor ratings increase, but it's not huge.
You might look at this chart and look down at the motivations for the kind of work I'm talking about today.
I think you'd be mistaken to do that. And I put two charts in mainly because I just really like them.
I think they illustrate the point I'm trying to make. So in this chart here on the horizontal axis we've got yes, on the vertical axis,
we've got proportion of people rating their local police as very good.
And then each one of those lines represents the views of people born in a particular decade.
So the blue line at the top, the dark blue line is people born in the night before the 1920s.
Next slide down as people born in the 1920s, in the 1930s and Nazi forces, etc., etc. just to kind of suit a cohort analysis.
And what it clearly shows in the early years,
a huge proportions of people born quite a long time ago who were writing their local police as very good.
But as these two decades went on, their views collapsed down to meet the views of the younger people who'd always been slightly more suspicious,
slightly more sceptical of the police. This is real funnel shape.
So by the time we get to the most recent year, there's almost no variation in age and opinions of the police.
The views of the people who previously had the most favourable perception of the police
had gone down to meet those who previously had the least favourable this chart.
So the same story, just exactly the same thing in a sense.
But now we have the views of a notional 50 year old man, white man, living outside the inner city.
That's the blue line. And the red line is the views of a notional 20 year old man from an ethnic minority group living in the inner city.
And again, you've got this funny shape so often.
What I think both these charts demonstrate is there really was a decline in trust and confidence over this period.
It really was something that people needed to be concerned about and they were right to pick up on as an issue.
It wasn't of overweening importance, which is some of the things in some ways it's presented in various parts of the literature,
and you're not necessarily observant among you.
Even if you noticed, I put scare marks around trust and confidence throughout so far as a number of reasons for doing this.
I mean, this is the commonly accepted term, which seems to be the commonly accepted term for talking about public opinion and police.
People will always talk about trust and confidence. No one ever sat down to think what they meant by this mean.
I think I'll go on to suggest to the minute that it's quite a lot to do with legitimacy.
But people didn't really want to talk about declining legitimacy. The police, that sounded a bit scary.
So they said trust and confidence and said no one ever worked out what to trust.
The police might actually me I'm not to any great extent and not so that facing up to this
various police organisations start to say we need to know more about public opinion,
we need to unpack this trust and confidence to find out what's going on underneath it and what factors might, in a sense, drive trust and confidence.
So to fascinate 2009, I had some colleagues from I to see started to do some work with the M.P.s to generate a kind of more robust,
more robust set of measures around the issues of trust and confidence,
which really got to grips with what might be going on underneath and really engage with the literature on trust, for example.
And the NPF still has targets based on these measures to stay safe.
Our commanders in the Met are still tasked with increasing public trust and confidence across some of the measures that I'm just about to describe.
And I've seen the literature on trust is vast and we can only ever look at small amounts of it, I think.
Titular relevant definitions are understandings of trust.
In this context, revolve around the work of people like Baba and Hardin.
So Baba says that trust involves expectations that those we trust will be technically competent to do the things we are trusting them to do,
and that those we trust will place our own interests above our own. And of course, that therefore implies that they know what our own interests are.
They understand what our interests are within a particular trust relationship.
Part is, says the same thing slightly more succinctly to say we trust you means we believe you have
the right intentions towards us and you are competent to do what we trust you to do.
Just about intentions. It's about competency. I think you could also say it's about expectations and evaluations.
When you trust someone, you expect them to behave in a certain way.
But your expectations, at least partly based on your evaluation of their prior behaviour or performance.
So trust always wraps up, I think, expectation and evaluation.
And the other thing about trust in this context and indeed mothering actually talks about trust in a business context more than anything else.
He says trust always involves a leap of faith. You're always trusting in relatively low information context.
If you had all the information about someone, you wouldn't need to trust them because you'd know what they were going to do in a particular context.
And trust also is also therefore always implies it implies contexts of risk.
So based on this work and based on some other work that people don't past, obviously we didn't come to this on our own, really.
We define three dimensions of trust in the lens Metropolitan Police,
but I think these could apply to police organisations very much more widely in that.
So it's often a slice of fun, a bit wrong with us to talk about trust in police effectiveness,
trust in police community engagement and trust in police fairness.
Trust the police effectiveness as a competence. Trust in police community engagement.
Trust in police fairness wraps up intentions, right intentions, shared interests, motivations, so forth.
So and we tend to find and I'm going to talk about some of the measures we use to look at these things in a minute.
We tend to find these are empirically distinct constructs or components of trust,
but they also sense some sense of some together to generate an overall measure of trust and confidence.
Should you wish to do that? Why is distrust important?
While I don't think I really need to stress this in this context,
but there's a lot of evidence to suggest to the extent that people trust organisations or institutions such as the police,
they're more likely to cooperate with them,
they're more likely to defer to them, they're more likely to comply with orders and more likely to come forward of information,
etc. There's almost the obvious link between trust and confidence and legitimacy with files already addressed.
But there's some questions here, of course, and this is one of the reasons why they're so interesting,
is were they're interested in not just knowing what trust looked like,
but the kind of factors that shaped trust in the police because they've been tasked with increasing public trust and confidence,
they wanted to know, what can we do about this? How can we how can we work with the public to enhance their sense of trust in us?
As an organisation, we need to think a bit more about the relationship between trust and legitimacy and
we need to make a bit more about what the police can do to bolster these things.
This is where procedure justice theory comes in. I think this is the basis for almost all of the work I've done so far in this office.
I think the most robust and most empirically well-supported way of understanding the nature of
police community relations and the types of things police officers can do to enhance or of course,
undermine trust, I should always say. And Mary's my hair because she was picking up on this.
I always talk about these things in a very positive sense. I'm always talking about things that police can do to increase trust.
But they all the relationships and we're talking about still have bi directional.
They feel lots of things that police can do to motivate distrust or damage trust.
And these tend to be the reverse. The kind of things I'm thinking about today.
It's important to recognise that pursuit of justice theory developed by Tom Taylor and colleagues working in the United States in the 1980s,
finding increasing purchase in criminal justice contexts around the world.
Although it's probably not a universal. We don't think that.
I don't think and this is really at its base a theory or a model for understanding social relations in group settings,
particularly groups where one member of the group represents the group as a whole,
and particularly group settings where one member of the group has significant power over other members of the group.
I can't think I think of a better way of describing the relationship that people in person have with the police on that basis.
It provides a way of understanding, as I say, what types of police behaviour motivate trust,
generate legitimacy, generate cooperation, generate compliance.
Most of you will have heard this before. So with a history of this, I'd say Justice Very says that when police, police officers treat people unjustly,
respectfully, with dignified treatment, when they use less transparent,
fair decision making, when they allow people to voice,
when they look like they're listening to people's voice and nobody is prepared to act on what people.
It's an incident that this generates a sense that the police are behaving in a fair way.
It generates precisely a sense of trust and a sense of pursuit of justice.
A sense of trust flows into legitimacy.
And, of course, the pursuit of justice, moral legitimacy flows into cooperation, deference, compliance with the law, all this good stuff.
If you like this matter flow out the hand. And of course, that is the one of the most important aspects of SEO.
Just as there is, it says that procedural justice is a more important way of generating trust and generating legitimacy.
Then the instruments of effectiveness of the police. When people encounter police officers,
they tend on average to care much more about the way this police officers behave in
relation to them than the kind of the rewards or dis benefits as police officers,
an officer in terms of getting a seven goes back, in terms of arresting them, what those instrumental outcomes might be.
Why is prestige justice work? Well, it works because we're dealing with group settings.
So the basic idea is that police officers represent an important sense, a social groups which most people feel they belong, nation state community.
So you can catch those in different ways.
When police officers interact with people that send an important message, messages about their status, their inclusion, their value within this group.
So fair treatment communicates you're included in this group. Unfair treatment communicates you.
You're excluded from this group. When you feel included, you're motivated to legitimise group authorities, you're motivated to cooperate with.
And on behalf of the group, you activists comply with its laws. So there's an important effective element procedure.
It makes you feel excluded and that motivates a whole set of behaviours.
I think there's also that kind of a portion evaluative aspects of procedural justice and police are exemplars
of good comes at or at least they should do so when police officers behave in a certain way to use towards us,
we use this to provide information. So that is this police officer behaving the way that they should behaving.
And when they are, that motivates a reciprocal set of reciprocal sets of behaviours on our part when they're behaving in the wrong way.
That might most fair, quite different set of behaviours on our part and of course in procedures,
justice works and there's a lot of evidence that it does and cooperation and compliance with the police,
with the law to be secured most importantly by process, by staff,
is a policing that tends the relationship between police and officials, between police and community.
And this is where the two experiments really come in, I think.
And a quick word on defining which is missing out in terms of I think it's always
useful to define terms and there's lots of fuzzy social science terms in all of this.
When I'm talking about legitimacy for the purposes of today, I'm drawing most important in the work of David Bassam, who's political scientist.
And he says that legitimacy is always granted by individuals to those who have power over them in some context,
on the basis of common shared values, most importantly, but more specifically, three dimensions of a relationship,
if you like, must be fulfilled before power can be considered legitimate within a particular
social context that's going to conformity of that power authority to a set of rules,
the justify ability of those rules in terms of shared place.
And it was not only must the police abide by a set of rules, but we, as the police must declare in some sense the right sets of rules.
And finally, it's not enough claims be for for people to believe the authorities are legitimate.
They have to act in ways that both serve to recognise this legitimacy and I think empirically reproduce it on the ground.
So he talks about expressed consent of first governed by a power.
In the context of policing we tend to think about the duty to obey.
We think to is interesting that the legitimate said police persist consists at least in part.
I mean people sense that they have a duty to obey the instructions of police officer.
And of course out there in the real world, actual acts of deference,
actual acts of obedience to the will of these officers serves to reproduce the legitimacy of police in particular contexts.
Primarily, what I'm talking about here, of course, is legitimacy is a psychological state.
So legitimacy of police as it exists inside people's minds as the primary objects of concern today.
So you can think about this again as being the recognition and justification of the right of a power to exercise that power,
exercise influence on a group of people.
And when you're thinking about sources of trust and legitimacy and now, as I said, I'm going to get to the experiments in a minute.
And of course, it's not all about procedural justice.
That would be not naive and ridiculous to say that it's not even all about effectiveness and the other aspects of police activity.
So you might want to think, for example, about wider experiences of crime and the effect that they have may have on trust and legitimacy.
We may want to think about symbolic aspects of policing. We may want to think about the extent to which police represent any body.
Order and legitimacy may be granted or withdrawn on the basis that they managed to do so successfully.
They appear to manage to do so successfully. There's a consistent link, for example, between police visibility, trust and legitimacy.
We find that in many, many cross sectional survey contexts,
many seeing police is in the British context associated with high levels of trust, high levels of legitimacy.
And of course, you could also then put in a whole range of psychological factors, such as psychological factors, such as witchcraft, etc., etc.
So you could come up with a model of trust and legitimacy, which is useful to me.
But let's say to those of you at the back that basically all this is saying is on the left hand side,
we've got lots of factors, lots of things that could feed into trust and just say visibility, personal contact.
That's what I'm concentrating on today.
Vicarious contacts of the kind of stories that circulate within families, within social groups about the police.
Media, people's cultural repertoire and experiences of crime victimisation, expensive antisocial behaviour.
And then we cross social psychological factors.
So for example, authoritarianism, for example, system justification theory, for example, parties and such.
All these things going to feed into trust and in various complicated ways and even can to mistake its legitimacy.
And then on. In cooperation and compliance. Some questions.
I've already addressed at least one of these. I think it's worth raising.
You can see of motivates experiments. The first question of the first issue is most of the evidence on these issues.
Almost everything I've said so far today is evidenced and is evidenced by survey work,
but it's evidence almost entirely by cross-sectional survey work snapshot surveys
that any measure of opinions and attitudes and orientations at one point in time.
In other words, the evidence is good, but it's not that good.
And this is where the field experiments come in, because it allows us to test whether the use of procedural fairness,
the way that police officers handle contacts between members of the public,
over the service members of the public, whether visibility, a causal dealings with trust and legitimacy.
And we've also had the police per person experience contacts,
other forms of police activity and behaviours during that activity are likely to be important generators of trust and legitimacy.
But what can police do about this?
What are the policies that police officers can put in place or police managers can put in place to enhance trust, enhance legitimacy?
And one of the good things I think about doing experiments in this context is it really makes you think about this question.
It really makes you think, okay, well, what can police do in this context?
And thinking about what police can what can I please do in this context becomes your intervention in the experiment.
So that's a very, very long winded setup and a bit of background not to go on to the experiments themselves.
So I'm going to start with the matter of Community Patrol experiment.
This was in essence, I designed a set up to look at the effects of police visibility on public trust and confidence.
Actually, it sounds a bit more than that, and we'll come to that in a minute.
As I've noted, perceptions of police visibility are consistently linked with higher levels of trust and confidence in cross-sectional survey settings.
I've always been real sceptical of vaccines, at least possible, at least as possible.
The people who have relatively high levels of trust and confidence believe that they see the police enough or believe that
they see the police quite often than I used to think that the causality in most undoubtedly is flowing in both directions.
And underlying this, I think, is all of us have concerns. I can avoid that.
Do people really notice police activity and their neighbours might have got more
interesting and more important things to do than the current constantly noticing,
noticing whether police officers are patrolling in their areas and of course that is visibility causally linked to trust.
And this experiment is part of a much wider study into mounted police that Chris and I have been doing for the last 18 months.
We think it's probably the first study into massive policing has ever taken place anywhere in the world.
It is very niche, obviously,
but I think it uncovers lots of interesting elements and interesting aspects of policing in a context such as England and Wales.
So what did we do, which is a quasar experiment? It's a crazy experiment because there's no randomisation of the treatment.
So what we did is we took six areas, four in Gloucestershire and two in London.
The two are in Gloucester itself. Two are in the wider county of Gloucestershire and two were in south London.
They were mostly wards. One was slightly bigger than an actual ward. We matched them basically on where they were.
So we had the two areas in Gloucester, two areas in Gloucestershire, the two areas in south London.
They were actually very similar to each other across a lot of different measures.
And then we decided that three of those areas were going to get a dose of mounted policing.
They were the test areas for those areas. We're not going to get a dose of match policing.
Those were the control areas and we conducted first pre-test telephone survey of a sample size of a thousand.
That was in February this year. Then in March,
the test areas got the dose of mounted policing is basically was seven or eight six hour shifts at mass patrols in these areas over the course.
So it wasn't very much. And as I said, it's showing the minute the actual public facing time with the mounted units was about two and a half hours,
2 to 3 hours in the areas where they patrolled business as usual in the control sites.
So basically foot patrols. And then alongside this, in both the tests and the control sites, we did a set of systematic social observation.
Basically, we followed the horses around and we had a huge amount of help from students to do this.
Some of them are in the room at the moment, so thanks very much. And literally, we followed Ramstein.
It forces us for two and a half hours as they walked around these two neighbourhoods engaging will do whatever it was they were doing.
Chris developed a mobile phone app to help us do this.
So as we were following the forces around that were tapping into our mobile mobile phones, what was happening,
how many people were talking to them, the quality of the interaction, etc., etc. And then this was automatically uploaded to a database.
So the analysis was very, very useful, fantastic tool. And then we have hotels post test sample poster stuff as well.
So I had a match pass pre post design as to the technical phrase.
Well, that's it.
Here's some of the things we see, some of the images, what they look like actually this I mean, I think, Richard, you took all of these, didn't you?
This is relatively easy because usually as soon as they stop like this, as well as I can show, they were surrounded by people.
So as soon as don't help match it,
officers would stop in a shopping centre in the centre of town that act like a magnet to people who would literally,
in some cases, swarm around them, patting horses, talking. Still, that's probably really, really important.
But these were just. Neighbourhood patrols in the classic sense.
They just literally wandered around the neighbourhoods that we told them to go wander around.
They may have thought they were doing something different,
but they really wanted three hypothesis first weapons used in actual experiments, tests that they kind of we need to prove those.
We need to have some evidence relation says before we get to the third one.
So the first hypothesis is where people would notice this mode of policing and as I say, is open to some question that people notice policing in that.
And then April's second hypothesis that seeing mass patrols would be associated with high levels of trust and confidence.
And in this study, we distinguish between these components of trust and confidence, fairness, effectiveness, community engagement.
And we had overall measures of confidence as well.
And the third hypothesis we tested with the experimental data content of the police would increase in test sites, rates of control sites.
This is how we measured the components of trust. I'm sure you can't see those. But trust implies community engagement.
And then this is this is probably the most important one in this context.
So we measured that by questions that I understand to the police in this area.
Do you agree or disagree? The police in this area understand issues that matter to people in the area in which you live,
engage with all members of the public in which you live, attacking the issues that matter to people in the area.
Shoot. If you see what we're trying to get to with community engagement and trust in police force,
do they keep you treat people with dignity and respect on a friendly and approachable effectiveness?
Are they effective at preventing crimes? Are the effects of catching people who commit crimes?
And overall confidence. And that's got a measure of whether you would report a crime in the future.
How confident are you in the ability of the police to deal with crime and disorder issues in your neighbourhood?
And taking everything to count how good a job developers do.
Overall measure of confidence. First of assisted people.
Notice the match patrols. Absolutely. I'm stunned by this data.
Every time I look at it in the test areas, the proportion of people reporting that had recently seen massive police rise from 15% to 43%.
Now, I should say, none of these areas have had regular amounts of patrols before in living memory.
The 15% in the three test periods comes all from London.
So people in London are just more used to seeing horses in some general sense.
So they were saying, yes, I had seen massive patrols in the neighbourhoods. They hadn't.
There's not a typical. This is the kind of stuff you get with survey data in one area.
This is our ancestor in Gloucestershire of roughly half the town,
according to this data noticed that had been in recent months of patrols in their area.
It's a massive place associated with high levels of trust and confidence. Again, definitely.
So 79% of those who had recently seen mass patrols agreed to the statement.
The police understand the issues that matter to people in the area in which you live,
compared to 69% of those who hadn't recently seen police control.
And I find again, I find this stunning. Let's think about that for a second.
Merely having seen an officer on horseback is associated with ten percentage point shift in people, agreeing.
The police understand the issues, the matter of people in the area in which they live.
Make of that what you will purposes.
The analysis is differences and differences.
So what we're doing is looking at change in the test sites relative to change in the control sites because get pre and post measures in both.
So this chart plots the differences in differences coefficients.
If the if if the dot is above the zero line, that means there was a positive change in the test sites compared with the control sites.
So all those dots mean three of those dots are positive. But error bars indicate there was two cities tested statistically divisible from zero.
But because we've done the system systematic social observation,
we knew that the patrols in Gloucester had been going outside the area in which they were meant to be patrolling into the city centre,
where they all must undoubtedly have been seen by people living all over Gloucester, including those living in the control sites.
So we had treatment, migration at people in the control site experience the treatment which is meant to be limited to the test sites.
When we looked in the data, yes, the proportion of people in the control site in Gloucester saying that they'd recently seen matched
security patrols in the neighbours had increased significantly and they hadn't recently seen mass patrols.
And that was because I wanted it. I seen them in the city centre, but you get the idea this is the way that people answer certain questions.
So when we take Gloucester out, which I think we probably should be, I think this best,
these results should be considered together because it's not entirely clear whether one is right and one is wrong.
But when we take Gloucester out, we find that the map of patrols has a significant and positive effect on trust in police community engagement,
trust in police fairness and overall confidence, and almost on effectiveness as well.
All those coefficients are positive and actually quite large. It's it's not quite statistically significant and conventional.
I would say the systematic social innovation was integral to this experiment.
It never would have worked as well as it did or at all if we hadn't have been doing systematic social observation at the same time.
So we sat out together collectively.
That was, as I say, that was a lot of this quite a large number of us involved in this increase in people from place to place in Gloucestershire.
We set out to take shifts in both the test and control sites, which is 64 hours of public facing police time in total.
We recorded over 5600 what we termed engagements between police and public.
What we were interested in doing was trying to notes, trying to record people, noticing police.
That's obviously quite difficult.
I mean, anyone, for instance, sees a police officer when they're walking down the street, even if it's only to step out of their way.
We were looking for something slightly more than that, some kind of active recognition.
So what we tended to do was record. What we did do is record things like if someone stopped and pointed at the horse.
If someone took a camera, it's a photo of the horse, of the officer.
If someone punches their child and we could see that their child was registered those because those
are the things that we think people might remember when stimulated to set by the survey instrument.
Further down the line, we also recorded more in-depth interactions between officers and members of the public.
And what we found is the horses generated six times as many as many of these basic encounters as the four officers in the control size.
This is really getting to understand just how noticeable these things are to people when they're walking around in neighbourhood settings.
There wasn't that many of a statistically significant difference between the officers in the control sites and the match officers in the test sites.
But what we did find is when it came to slightly longer, more in-depth interactions with officers,
that people actually talking to them more than say hello when there was a horse there.
These encounters tends to be more positive.
So it's something about the force that seems to be enabling positive encounters between police and members of the public.
But the same number roughly translates to neutral sites. But those in the test sites were more positive.
So why did it work? Which is what is I mean, I think the experiment works because the intervention was clear, it was precise, it was simple.
It was very, very different from business as usual.
I find the system a6's observation greatly aided in its acts and results, massively aided interpreting the results.
It is the ultimate cause of the observed effects.
This is where it starts. Get a bit interesting. We're not sure.
We don't know whether it was the horse, the rider or the horse and the rider and also their implications for that.
And one of the interesting things that we can never know that because you can't separate out the horse and the rider in this context, it's impossible.
So this intervention is something I'll come back to towards the end of his intervention, although it seems quite simple, in fact, it is quite simple.
It's also quite complicated. We don't know what it is, what combination of horse, right.
And horse and what caused the effects that we observed.
What are the lessons?
Well, some of the lessons here are quite clear, and I think police deployments in neighbourhood patrol can increase public trust.
And this probably has something to do with both visibility and engagement.
I think it's probably something to do with both being there and talking to people and
some combination of those two things that lets the increase in public trust encompass,
hence the community engagement measures and the large effects that the mass patrol seemed to have on this.
I mean, our lessons here are much less clear. I mean, do we put all neighbourhood police on horses?
Is that the lesson here? Well, clearly not. So what the policy lessons here for police managers, how long do these effects last?
We have designed that the experiment has always an issue of any kind of intervention like this.
How long did it take? People's views in the test sites to regress back to their previous level?
I would suggest probably not at all. Ashley And another issue here, this is in a sense, a much bigger issue.
One lesson from this and actually the way it's being interpreted is improving some sections of police service.
Is that all you have to do if you've got trouble just in case confidence in particular is put more police officers in there.
And that in and of itself will wave a magic wand and and solve the problem that you have.
That's extremely unlikely to be the case. And it also raises the issue of how much policing is too much.
Is there a sweet spot here where you give people some extra police and it's fine,
you give them a lot more and it starts to be seen as an occupation at the outset.
But it's worth asking the question. Another issue and again, we'll return to this at the end.
Does everyone react to visible policing in the same way? Highly visible policing in the same way as they seem to have done in this experiment.
Again, surely not just one experiment which worked well as an experiment.
It worked extremely well as an experiment. The second study I want to talk about Scots, that study, what's called that.
I mean, it actually worked much less well as an experiment as I would go on to explain, but is nonetheless so extremely interesting.
This really harks back to right to the core of the procedural justice model.
That's the motivation for this study. So we're moving away from visibility.
Per say I perhaps a bit of chatting between police and public security,
trying to get the police to operationalise some of the core elements of the procedural
justice model in the way they're dealing in the way that they're talking with people.
It's got to that was at its inception was intended to be a replication of the Queensland Community engagement trial.
Q So is a study done by Ray Massaro and her team and I think 2010 in Queensland as you is, you'd expect in Australia.
And this was looking at the effects of a procedural justice intervention in the context of mass random breath testing in Queensland.
So I don't know if you've been Australia, you've seen this and what they do in Australia, they do it in lots of states.
I think they set up huge roadblocks and they put in large numbers of people on a more or less random basis.
Obviously it's always unclear what random means in that context, but it seems random to the drivers, I suspect,
and the baseline encounter in set where they built their intervention on seemed to be something like the officer would march up to the car,
he'd he or she would thrust the breathalyser into the window, blow in this, the person blowing this, the reading would come back negative.
They would say on your way. They averaging counselling from the baseline in case that was 30 seconds.
That's important. So what they did in that was design an intervention that was intended to increase the pursuit
of justice of that encounter from the perspective of the members of the public being stopped.
So they started off with just getting the officers to say hello. My name is Officer 75 from such and such station.
Today we're doing random breath tests. This is why we're doing it. They hadn't been doing that before, and then they felt more and more surprising,
just as modelled on the intervention and the average encounter length in the in the test area in Q was one was 90 seconds.
So they kind of tripled the length of the encounter, but it was still only 90 seconds long.
And they found this intervention had a positive effect on perceptions of police fairness during the encounter,
satisfaction with the encounter overall, and trust in police legitimacy in a more general sense and case that we aim to replicate this in
the context of race policing in Scotland there is a reputation of a randomised controlled trial,
treatment of the experiment and we were examining a high volume routine encounters between members of the public and police officers.
However, when we started looking at what was going on in Scotland,
it was very apparent to us that it was very different to what was going on in Scotland.
So the most obvious place to implement this trial was around what they call their
national festive road safety campaign that they run every year over Christmas for very,
very, very obvious reasons. During this campaign, drivers stopped with the aim of preventing drunk driving.
Although in Scotland they're not allowed to do random breath tests, they have a reason to breathalysed someone.
And for improving vehicle and driver safety on the graves during the Scottish winter.
At the beginning, Police Scotland estimates have been around 20,000 encounters doing this right road safety festival.
If it's called race but never say the festive road safety campaign says high volume.
There's a lot of contact between police and public in this campaign. And again, we have match pairs, pre posters.
That's why the song was actually different excuse as well. So there are 20 race police units in Scotland's be divided into ten pairs
primarily on geographical factors were some other factors were important as well.
Then we randomly assigned one of those pairs to the test group and then the other one went into the control group.
All drivers stopped over the last period in Scotland were given a questionnaire to some of them it says some of them were in control.
But our main issue was a business in usual. Scotland was different to that in Australia.
Scottish police were already doing a lot of things that the perceived justice model suggests they shouldn't do.
So they were much better at talking straight, so much better explaining to Travis what had been stuck there,
much more in some sense, friendly with Travis.
I mean, I think you want to put some caveats around that, but it was clearly a very different kind of encounter than what was going on in Australia.
So we had, we were faced with the challenge of how can we design an intervention and how can we design the intervention to
make our intervention as different from business as usual as possible within the context of these encounters.
So what we did is we designed a set of working with the police, with the focus groups and what have you around this.
We designed a kind of checklist or move in that really boiled down.
It's a checklist that attempted to show that they would verbally communicate all of a series of key messages
based around the pursuit of justice model during their encounters with people during the road safety campaign.
We also added a leaflet to this,
so all the drivers in the test condition got a leaflet so that the intervention was both making sure the officers did all their things
on that checklist in terms of procedural justice and gave people a leaflet which was intended to explain people why they'd been stopped.
The importance of the campaign. So. Rankin Communication of why police are doing this.
So the key message was obviously respect, equality, trustworthy motives, dignity, they try to seize it and passive participation,
etc., etc. All the core elements of social justice were meant to go into these experimental encounters.
And that's the checklist. Again, you can't say that, but just in case anyone is interested.
The question is this his offices were given an 858 memoir to carry around,
and they were supposed to remember to do all these things during the encounter.
That's the leaflets got a bit distorted when I copied it out, but basically it starts off, for example.
Thank you for your time today. We welcome your views on all aspects of police in Scotland.
Details of our latest initiatives local police and teams as contest. We found a website.
I wanted a phone number on there, but they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't give us a phone.
But you get the idea for hypothesis.
Most of us in this experiment, we had an intervention.
They just explained first hypothesis they would improve perception of perceived justice and trust with the officers doing the stop itself.
Second hypothesis it would increase overall satisfaction with the overall satisfaction why the officers behave doing and stop further officers.
It would increase trust and confidence in the police in Scotland in a general sense.
So we got people's perceptions of specific officers conduct in the stock and their perceptions of
the police in Scotland more widely and for psychosis that the intervention would increase police,
but just the perception of police legitimacy in Scotland as a whole.
And just as I promised, I'd come back to this and this is how we measure legitimacy in this study and in lots of studies as well.
So we distinguish between different two different components of legitimacy, what we can call perceived duty to it by the police.
I feel a moral obligation to pay the police. I feel a moral duty to support the decisions of police officers, even when I disagree with them.
I think you're trying to have you see what we're trying to get out there and what we call moral or normative alignment with the police.
The police have the same sense of right or wrong as me. Please stand up for values that are important for people like me.
I support the way police usually act in our systems.
Again, differences and differences. So we were looking at how we have pre post-match press.
We had a survey in the field in the first week of December.
We then took a week off when we distributed the survey questionnaires and all the materials to the officers and the experimental units.
And then we had a survey running from that first, second week right to the end of the paper, which I think was the 2nd of January.
So pre and post measures again. So again, we're looking at differences in differences.
So the analysis is exactly the same as before. Why is the change in the test size compared with the change in the control sites?
Again, a positive coefficient would indicate this positive change in the test sites compared with the control sites or the coefficients and negative.
We didn't make things better. We didn't even look at effect. We made things worse.
So in the control sites, perceptions of stop procedure justice fell compared to the control sites just doing the also found that it wasn't quite
statistically significant and satisfaction with the SOC significantly in the control sites compared with the test sites.
I can't say this again enough. We didn't make things better. We made things worse.
Similarly, with overall trust, I mean, they're not statistically significant.
Again, they're both never negative and that's actually quite large as these things go.
And similarly, illegitimacy, again, negative, not statistically significant, nothing said.
So I prefer this one. We have the data didn't support our forces.
In fact, the data contradicted intervention, damaged perceptions of severe justice to in of intervention decreased satisfaction of the stock.
There's no significant effect on general trust and confidence. Nice checks on legitimacy for all the statistical effects in the study were negative.
So in some overall sense I'm quite confident saying we just made things worse.
Why is that? Why didn't it work in this context?
Well, I think there's a number of reasons. For one thing, again, it was important to notice again, it seems quite simple.
We've got a really quite complicated intervention here.
Not only have we got two aspects of it, we've got the checklist and things the officer wants to do and the leaflet,
but we've got all the different things that the police officers were meant to do. We didn't know which one of those things they were meant to do.
We had the effect that we experience in which combination of those things.
I think what really happened is we bureaucratised the encounter.
So to the extent that the officers did the things that we told them to do, and of course that's always open to some doubt in this context.
I think they become more became more worried about ticking boxes.
They became more worried about doing all the things that are meant to do.
And in doing so, they became less interested in the person they were dealing with.
I also suspect the process took longer in the experimental sites and this was precisely experienced is precisely unfair by the people involved.
Because if you take if you drag something out, if something takes longer than it really needs to,
I think you're really communicating disrespect to someone by inside.
I don't care about the time. I'm going to keep you here as long as I need to. And there's some evidence from that.
And Q said, because in Q set a time the length of the encounters.
So the main encapsulated from Q set was 90 seconds but had a positive effect on trust, legitimacy,
etc., etc. When the encounter length went, I think it's over something like 130 seconds.
That effect reversed and then the intervention had a negative effect on trust, which is messy cooperation.
That's probably something. It could be the leaflet. I'm actually don't think so.
Various raised them 20 people in the experimental group couldn't.
Remember, Ganguly fell over, couldn't remember, didn't gain the leaf, didn't get the leaflet.
Their views were much, much more negative, and everyone else in the experiment took it.
So I don't think it was any favour. Of course it could have been.
And there's a follow up study in the pipeline to really try and get to grips with some of the ideas.
So, again, we're conducting focus groups with the cops involved in the intervention to see,
you know, what went wrong, how could we do this better in the future?
So I'm coming to the end now, has a few final slides.
First, reflecting on experiments of experiments in public companies, places you see,
and I think possibly in criminology and criminological settings more broadly.
And I think one important message here, and this should be fairly obvious,
but I think it's important to reiterate experiments that really work in isolation and even much,
much more effective, most effective, properly effective when they're embedded with a very set of a modes of research,
as we found in the matter of community patrols, is systematic.
Socialisation was a vital aspect of that piece of research.
And of course, in terms of replication, replication is a powerful device, but as we saw, replication can be difficult.
So one of the one of the implications, I think from an example publishing, Scott said,
and I suspect it will be treated by most people as a replication of CUSA.
It really wasn't. It was another type of experiment altogether.
But we treat it as a replication that has implications.
This touches on a point I raised before. We've considered average effects.
All statistical analysis at the top of your talking right is looking at average effects.
So on average,
people in the communities who experienced the massive patrols had higher levels of trust and confidence as a result of those patrols, we think.
But that doesn't mean to say that everyone in those communities felt the same way about those mounted patrols.
It's possibly quite likely that some people came away with more negative views of the police.
As a result, have views were just swamped by the positive results of people?
And how to isolate this variation of in different population groups is a real challenge for both this type of work and,
as I say, experiments in criminological ecological settings more widely.
And things can go right, things go wrong as well as rates, or more likely no effects, to be honest.
But things can get really quite seriously. Well, what do you do with that?
What do you do with that information? I think that has best theoretical and policy implications in a kind of philosophy of science
sense in Scots that we designed an intervention based on the principles of pursuit of justice.
We spent quite a lot of time doing that. We've built all those principles into that.
We really tried our best to make this work in this context. We made things worse.
So we should go back and revisit your theory because there's something wrong with our theory. It's not doing.
It's not explaining the world in the way we think it should do. That's not going to happen.
I can guarantee you. No one is going to go back to procedures just tomorrow, I think.
Well, there's something wrong with this theory of back of Scots now. And I think in the case of justice, I think that's justified.
There's lots and lots and lots of other evidence out there suggest the pursuit of suspects are real,
not do persist in the world in some sense, obviously in other contexts that might not be the case.
And there probably I think there's always a temptation in experimental research to think that you've got the intervention wrong and
all you need to do is redesign the intervention rather than revisiting the theory that motivates the intervention in the first place.
In policy terms, do we want police in Scotland to come away from this saying not only no,
we don't need to worry about pursuing justice, as our officers are already doing quite well at this.
But well, anything we try to do about procedures, justice isn't going to make things better.
It's going to find things worse. What obviously not. And of police Scotland police in Scotland off which fortunately not that stupid but
again I think you can see the risks that may make may come out of some of this stuff.
I mean, I think much more broadly, of course, experiments can create as many questions as science is the answer.
And and complex interventions are particularly problematic in this.
But many of the interventions and lots of the experiments that people are doing with in
criminology and a far more complicated than the interventions I've just described to you today.
And even in this relatively simple context, we've seen the implications of trying to unpick what aspects of the massive trial had an effect
on trust and what aspects of our intervention in Scotland that led to these negative outcomes.
And it's obviously all speaks to the much more important idea. And yes, I was impressed by Nancy Cartwright, some of the people she's worked out.
It's a problem for policymakers in particular of taking the results of randomised controlled trials and other types of experiments and saying,
well, it works over here, it works in this context.
Will it work in the context in which I'm operating in and complex interventions are make that really,
really difficult to unpick in terms of kind of trust and confidence and legitimacy research.
I think I think some of the key lessons Sarah and other people might have other ideas
and it seems pretty obvious to me now and I've always been very sceptical about this,
that the long term decline in public confidence I was talking about at the beginning
probably really has got something to do with declining police visibility over that time.
There's this decline in trust and confidence happened over a period when, for example, rural police stations were closed.
The police basically withdrew from many rural areas of England and Wales when police officers were moving off the streets and its cars.
And so I think. It's in different ways on that basis. And I think this is the kind of research we've done with the horses,
it fits with some other work is restarting and says there's just a link between police visibility and trust and confidence.
The question then becomes, what do you do that due to that? I mean, take one of the test areas in the trunk study.
This is science tester.
I'm pretty confident that people in science tester are getting about the right level of pacing they need in some objective sense.
I don't think it's a very high crime area. The police are there. They do do foot patrols in the area.
There is a police station and someone says that they will come if you call them, etc., etc.
But the fact that they react so well. So these these massive patrols really indicate to me that they're not getting the kind of police that they want.
So how do you offset their subjective needs for highly visible forms of policing that may not be particularly effective in reducing crime,
doing disorder, etc., etc., but satisfy the needs and wishes of the communities you're meant to be serving as police officers.
The results from Scott set really suggest to me that when you've got contacts with
relatively high levels of trust and confidence across the population as a whole,
which is what you've got in Scotland, which is what you've got in England, well,
for all a significant variation within that population, it seems unlikely that I think actually to me reflecting on this,
the public perceptions are unlikely to be boosted any further from their already relatively high levels by just a simple additive effect.
We just need to do a bit more procedural justice and we're going to get returns to that.
In terms of trust and confidence, legitimacy, we may need more radical interventions.
I think which parts in particular target those groups in the population that don't have high levels of trust?
We don't have that sort of dismissing. And of course, there's a whole other set of questions of how do you identify those groups?
What kind of interventions can you do that?
Do they do do they look like procedural justice interventions that the general population might respond well to or not?
Or do they look sorry? Not something very quite really quite different. And I think two points before I finish.
One way to look, almost everything I've said to say is really this is just took an operation,
operations in the operation operationalisation of the kind of bleedin obvious right.
Of course people want perceived policing. Of course, people want police officers to treat them fairly.
Of course, people want physical signs of order in the community.
We didn't need experiments and expending tens of thousands of pounds on these things to prove that was the case.
But that's not how much we had around that. But I think the research is interesting nonetheless.
But if that being the case, if it's so obvious that these are things the police should be do, why do they get it wrong?
So break is relatively often.
What are the things motivating the police not to behave in the ways I've been talking about today, which everyone kind of thinks they should.
They think they should in those circumstances, but they don't always behave like that.
Why is that? Why do police officers misbehave so relatively often?
There's a whole other set of interesting questions asked.
Yes, I think this should be a key direction kind of trust, confidence, legitimacy, research in the future.
Turn the lens back onto the police service and think about the ways that motivate their behaviours.
And the final point, and I'm still not quite sure I'm kind of phrasing this right,
but one of my concerns here and again this is a concern it's both specific in a trust is we see
research and I think applies in other areas of criminal justice research as well is there's a risk of
what I can only characterise as insurance lies in the aims of criminal justice research and seems to
me the pursuit of justice policing process based policing models are good in themselves and needs.
They don't need actors and other experiments and some sort of research decides to come along and say,
if you do this, you will get some reward for that long. You as a peace officer, you will get high levels of cooperation, you'll get out of it.
I don't need that to justify their existence, that just their existence is justified by the fact of Facebook behaving in that way.
And of course, you could say again and this is a much wider point, the high levels of customer satisfaction, you better come as customer satisfaction.
Public satisfaction with the police is a positive endpoint in and of itself.
And it's go any further than that. And of course, you don't need experimental designs to trace that.
You can do that with a survey or just by talking to people. And I think that's not just.
Darren, thank you very much.