Public confidence and engagement
We undertake regular surveys to assess the public's perceptions of the police, as well as their confidence in the police complaints system and our organisation.
We also seek regular feedback from our stakeholders to understand what is working well and where improvement may be needed. This feedback helps shape and inform our wider work to influence changes in policing, ensure accountability and encourage best practice and high standards of service. The surveys have been an important tool for measuring our progress.
Public Perceptions Tracker
We carry out surveys with members of the public to ask their view of us as an organisation and about the police complaints system. We currently work with Yonder, an independent research organisation, to carry out these surveys.
The data collected allows us to track levels of public confidence and provides a detailed insight into the public’s confidence in the police complaints system. The results from the survey help us to assess the impact our work is having. We also use the data to support our policy, engagement and communications work.
Previous public confidence surveys are available on the National Archives site.
Some of the key findings for 2022/23 include:
- There has been a substantial drop in confidence that police deal fairly with complaints made against the police. This is now at its lowest since 2017.
- This has been driven by news stories about police failings, misconduct and criminality, as well as the highly critical Casey Review into the Metropolitan Police following the murder of Sarah Everard.
- The drop appears to be affecting all members of the public, meaning that confidence of the public overall is in line with the levels traditionally seen amongst low confidence groups only.
- There has been an increase in awareness of the IOPC, although knowledge of what we do remains low - so we have more work to do.
The Public Perceptions Tracker runs on a regular basis. We ask core questions that cover the following topics:
- awareness of the IOPC
- people’s perception of our independence
- how likely people are to make a complaint about the police
- their views about how the police deal with complaints
Additional questions that have been asked include:
- people’s likelihood to complain about a case relating to violence against women and girls
- the public’s thoughts on police use of force
- what would most improve the public’s confidence in policing