Confidence and Satisfaction

This edition of articles is unusual because they come from one primary source—the research unit of the Metropolitan Police in London. They address one primary theme—the shift of the focus in the United Kingdom to judge the performance of the police against the yardstick of confidence rather than a basket of quantitative performance measures relating to crime and detection performance. This focus belies much deeper shifts that are going on below this change. In the UK, which has a fundamentally centralizing tendency in policing over the last 40 years, localism has emerged again, both in the rhetoric of political discourse of policing and in the shift of the national performance framework. In an interesting contrast to this, the Obama administration in the USA has reasserted a role for the Federal government in supporting and developing local policing through a series of substantial grants (totalling over $4bn) to local forces, for...