ABSTRACT
General questions about the police show a generally well satisfied public. Innumerable polls have shown that the police vie with the medical profession as the most trusted occupational group, leaving trades unionists at the other end of the scale with the status of used car dealers. The demographic correlates of general attitudes to the police are well established: the old are more favourable than the young; women more than men; non-manual households more than manual. People in cities are only slightly less favourably disposed than others. It is difficult to say which is the most severe of these problems; many of the more trivial contacts will simply be forgotten; there will be some ‘telescoping’, as crime surveys have shown; but most of all surveys will probably underestimate adversarial contacts. An idea which may produce some fruit is to combine survey findings with systems of area classification derived from the census, such as Acorn.
