Why Law Enforcement Agencies Should Measure Public Perception
Most law enforcement command staff I meet with have a good idea of how their community feels about their agency. They know this from their day-to-day experiences and interactions inside and outside their organization. Their cities and departments aren’t so large that they lose touch with their law enforcement customers (reporting parties and victims of crime). However, this anecdotal understanding of where an agency stands with its community is lacking in a few key ways:
1. It’s not persuasive. It’s hard to convince others that your community relationship is good or bad or unchanged if your only evidence comes from the personal experiences of individual officers.
2. It can’t compare one division, beat or neighborhood to another. It’s too difficult to reflect on daily experience and determine which positive or negative anecdote goes with which division.
3. It can’t be used to track change. How do new initiatives, technologies, and policies affect public perception? How has public perception changed from week to week?
All of the above issues come down to one theme: internalized opinions are not quantifiable, but consistent, targeted surveys are. Surveys that measure public perception will give police departments data to persuade other stakeholders of the reality of the situation and to improve operations by comparing things like divisions, customer types, and specific interactions while tracking changes over time.
In many cases an agency will have a strong relationship with its community, and command staff will know this because they’re heavily involved in day-to-day operations. City managers, city council, and community stakeholders are never going to be as close to the operations of an agency as the officers within that agency. What they know may come from complaints sent to their offices or stories from their own daily interaction with the community. If someone outside the agency believes public perception is down, proving that it isn’t is much easier with quantifiable data in hand. Survey data can help validate someone’s concerns or provide a data point that indicates there is more to the story. If survey data shows that public perception may be worse than expected, it gives the agency an opportunity to make targeted improvements before the situation gets worse. It also provides the agency with a data-focused justification for budgetary increases to help with resources required to solve public perception issues.
Command staff may believe that they have a good understanding of how their community feels about the agency as a whole, but it’s very rare to find an executive that can tell you how that perception changes from division to division without data. Breaking down survey responses by division can highlight what’s working and what’s not, enabling a department to improve its operations.
Law enforcement agencies regularly update policies, adopt new technology, and adapt to the ever-changing environment. Community sentiment and public perception changes with these variables. Survey data can show these changes over time and allow agencies to correlate trends with strategic initiatives. This capability can become an important way to determine the success of new projects.
As survey technology becomes more available, law enforcement agencies should use it to measure public perception. This data is a powerful tool that can help departments improve their customer service in a way that is limited by intuition alone.
