Twenty-five years of public confidence in the police

Tracking the responses given by respondents to the 1984 to 2005/06 sweeps of the British Crime Survey (BCS) to the general job-rating question – ‘how good a job do you think the police are doing?’ – we first sketch out the broad (and well-known in UK criminology) picture of change in public confidence in the police since the 1980s. We then examine whether aspects like age, gender, ethnicity and economic status have become more or less important in public confidence over the 20-plus years. ¹