Metropolitan Police, Marketing

Abstract

The terminology used to gauge public support also varies widely, with questions asking about whether respondents “approve of” or “trust” the police, have “confidence in” or “respect for” the police, or whether they “support” or have “favorable” views of the police. What makes these terms “general” is that the criteria or standards of performance remain unspecified. They do not ask the public to focus on either police processes or outcomes. The person answering this question could in good conscience choose both, neither, or perhaps something else entirely. And without additional information, we are unable to determine how much weight the survey respondent gives to specific aspects of police performance. Such questions are like those that ask the public to indicate whether they approve of the job that the president of the United States is doing - without specifying any particular aspect of that job. Such questions are useful, however, in that they give the survey respondent an opportunity to offer a summary that takes all of those aspects that are relevant to his or her view into account, weighting each, at least implicitly, as he or she prefers.

Introduction

Background of the Study

In today's mass-market media-driven society, it is becoming difficult to define ourselves before someone else does it for us. This is true for everything from laundry detergent to automobiles, and it holds for police departments. A community develops and holds an image of its police department. This image defines the standing of the police department and its employees in the community's esteem. It also affects the department's recruitment and retention, its budget, and the support it receives from the community. Unfortunately, too often police departments have allowed others to define their image instead of defining it for themselves.

The Public Image of the Police

In October 2001, the Administration of Justice Program at George Mason University completed a report, The Public Image of the Police, for the IACP Police Image and Ethics Committee, that identified historical trends in the public perception of the police.1 Among the various conclusions that could affect the branding of a department were the following:

•A citizen's confidence in the police depends more on his or her perceptions of a police officer's motives than on whether the outcome of a contact with an officer was favorable to the citizen.

•Racial minorities consistently show lower assessments of police than do whites, and the overall legitimacy of the police depends more on citizens' perceptions of how police treat them than on their perceptions of police success in reducing crime.

•Citizens' perceptions of how police treat them appear to affect their willingness to obey the law and obey the police.

•Citizens' expectations of how the police will perform affect their evaluation of how police actually perform during a specific contact.

•Most citizens regard the mass media as their prime source of information about crime, and crime news is the context for most mass media accounts of police work. The implicit message of much crime news is that police have been unable to catch ...