Design and Governance

The research project was initiated in 2021 at the request of the Authority’s Chair and the Deputy Chief Constable for Local Policing and is being delivered as a joint project by the SPA’s Strategy and Performance team and Police Scotland’s Prevention, Partnership and Community Wellbeing Division. One of the first steps was to set up a Project Steering Group, consisting of representation from the third sector, academia, Scottish Government, the College of Policing, as well as Police Scotland and the Authority.  The Steering Group was established in September 2021 and oversaw the development of the research design and selection criteria for localities across Scotland.

A primary aim of the Project is to gain additional insight into the relationship between deprivation and levels of trust and confidence in policing. Intersectional research carried out by the University of Edinburgh on Scottish Crime and Justice Survey data (and presented to the Policing Performance Committee in May 2020) identified that socio-economic deprivation was a critical factor in influencing levels of trust and confidence.

In addition to developing our understanding of trust and confidence in policing, the project also aims to work with communities to identify small-scale and replicable ‘tests of change’ that may help to positively affect local trust and confidence levels. ‘Tests of change’ may be completely innovative in nature or have been tried elsewhere.  Whether successful ‘tests of change’ are identified through the research, or not, a positive outcome from the project will be to strengthen the relationship locally between communities and local policing as a result of having conversations together, framed by the principles of co-design, and partnership implementation.

Learning from the project will be made available across Local Policing to support upscaling of any successful ‘tests of change’ identified, alongside a toolkit shaped by the experience of carrying out the research.