Twenty-five years of public contact with the police

In Chapter 3 we examined change over time in the socio-demographic correlates of confidence in the police. We showed an increasing similarity of views across different population groups. While important variations remain, opinions of the police now vary relatively little over classic sociological variables such as age and ethnicity. If these characteristics are only weakly correlated with opinions of the police, we should look elsewhere for sources of variation in public trust (and perhaps, by extension, in police legitimacy and cooperation with legal authorities).