Police: How can the police improve their image in Britain?

New figures have shown that almost half of Britons have no confidence that police will turn up to reports of burglary or car theft.

Transcript

00:00Steve, thank you for joining us. What factors do you believe have contributed to a decline

00:05in trust in the British police?

00:07Well, when we talk about trust, it's this idea that we can look up to public establishments

00:13and I think the police have suffered from the decline in the belief that public establishments

00:18and organisations work in the best interest of the public. The police quite clearly have

00:25had their own issues in recent years. We see less of them, or fewer of them, if I have

00:30the correct English. We don't have community police officers in the way we once did, people

00:37we can go and talk to, and quite often they tend to come in when there's a crisis and

00:41it's mob-handed. But also, there is the general perception that the police do not operate

00:45in the way they once did, that trivial crimes are somehow less important. If it's a burglary,

00:52they don't come out, car crime. But they do focus on things which seem to be irrelevant

00:58to people's lives, such as sending errant texts or WhatsApp messages or whatever it

01:04might be. Therefore, of course, there is this difficulty that people want to have police

01:08that they can believe will create a general aura of safe streets and safer homes. Of course,

01:16a lot of this is led by the belief that things have got much unsafer, which is not always

01:21necessarily true. The statistics tell us that, in many cases, we're as safe as we've

01:25ever been. But of course, we hear a lot more about murders and terrible crimes.

01:30So what role do you think political leadership plays in addressing people's lack of trust

01:35within the police?

01:36The danger we don't want to drift into is a paramilitary police force to deal with the

01:42bigger issues. We need to have more police officers walking the beat. The so-called Bobby

01:48the oldest of the day, who would issue warnings and perhaps not be so encumbered by the bureaucracy,

01:55which of course makes the life of a modern-day police officer such a curse.