Background & Context

During the period 2020-2022, aligned to the key Authority priority to maintain a focus on the public interest and to develop an understanding of the drivers of public trust and confidence in policing, the Authority commissioned a series of standalone independent public polling exercises.

These polling exercises used the well established ScotPulse national polling mechanism in order to gather independent, non self selecting and representative data for the Scottish adult population on public confidence associated with policing across a range of issues. Four separate polling exercises were undertaken during 2020-21 to establish and monitor public confidence data on the policing of the pandemic, giving informative and insightful trend data over the period. Using this same process subsequent surveys were carried out to explore views on support for the use of new and emerging technology in policing and the policing of COP26.

Building on the insights gained through the previous standalone polling, the Authority moved forward by developing a multi-year programme of commissioned regular independent polling of a representative sample of the Scottish public, with a view to establishing a regular and consistent representative poll that would further enhancing its understanding of variations in public trust and confidence.

This contributes to the Authority’s vision of policing in the public interest, by providing a large sample which is representative of the diverse profile of Scotland. The ongoing work is carried out by Diffley Partnership with polling on a six-monthly basis using the STV product, ScotPulse. This mechanism gives the Authority access to a panel of more than 43,000 citizens from which random, representative samples are drawn.

The disaggregation possible from the Scotpulse data set allows the overall average levels of trust and confidence in the police to be further explored in terms of gender, age geography, household size, SIMD and socio-economic status. The analysis of this data allows cross correlation of these factors and supports the Authority in identifying the sub-groups whose confidence in policing is both higher and lower than average. The graph below illustrates the degree of variation in confidence already evident at the macro level in Scotland: Women are more confident than men, older people are more confident than younger people, and people living in rural and less deprived areas are more confident than people living in deprived urban areas.

TABLE IN REPORT

1.6 During the last two years the Authority and Police Scotland have been investing significant effort to understand why confidence and trust is lower among some segments of the population and in some areas of Scotland, through detailed analysis of both SPA polling data and Police Scotland’s Your Police data. To date the main focus has been on engaging with those communities that experience socio-economic deprivation in some way, to better understand the reasons behind observations in the polling data that indicate there is lower-than-average levels of confidence in policing.

The Committee was updated in March 2024 on the work of the joint Community Confidence Action Research (CCAR) project and its participative, community-based approach in a diverse group of Scottish communities, covering Ayrshire, Fife, Perthshire and Caithness. Findings from the CCAR project are due to be published later in 2024-25 however early themes indicate that the drivers of confidence primarily relate to: (1) the visibility of community policing; (2) the presence and participation by the police in community events and meetings; and (3) the availability and relevance of information about local policing activity and achievements via local media, including more ‘hyperlocal’ social media.

As of June 2024, four waves of routine public polling have been conducted, extending back to the summer of 2022 and collectively they produce a sample of more than 10,500 people. This large sample size permits the production of statistically robust sub-group analysis and intersectional analysis.

This paper sets out key findings arising from analysis of the aggregated waves of data, focusing in this study on the views of women about policing and how (1) they differ from men and (2) there are variations among women based on a range of factors.