Analysis focused on public views of the police, and a considerable part of the present paper addresses the issue of satisfaction, trust, and confidence in the police. Particular attention was paid to analytical research that looked into the actual questions asked on surveys, their meaning and whether they measure what they are supposed to measure. Surveys on all levels of geography – national, provincial, or municipal – were considered for review.
Other police performance measures, such as operational metrics, are also touched upon, albeit to a lesser extent.Ī comprehensive and systematic literature review of published research of Canadian, as well as international literature in the field of police performance measurement through surveys was conducted. Specifically, an emphasis is placed on the questions that are asked on different public opinion and community surveys in Canada and internationally, with the ultimate goal of recommending better approaches to conducting such surveys. The aim of this project is to review and critically assess the current survey methods used to measure police performance in common law jurisdictions.
More research into either testing the existing questions or creating new standardized questions is required to improve the measurement of public satisfaction with the services provided by the police in Canada. Questions asked on surveys of municipal police tend to be unstandardized and inconsistent, with varying response category thus making them incomparable across time and place. This constitutes the only source of public opinion police performance metrics that is comparable across time and place in Canada. In Canada, only one national survey administered by Statistics Canada every five years asks six questions on police performance. Three notable studies have attempted to conceptualize and test specific measures of police performance measured through public opinion polling in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Research on the validity and reliability of specific questions on police performance is lacking in Canada and the Western World. The specific questions on police performance tend to be used on surveys in an arbitrary manner, often without proper understanding of the meaning of the question and responses. The questions also tend to be unstandardized, inconsistent, and at times, have poor choice of wording on questions and response categories, making comparisons across time and place impossible.
The general questions on satisfaction with police are important to ask on surveys, but tend to be too general to understand that about which citizens are content or discontent when it comes to the police. Measurements of police performance through public opinion polling may be distinguished in two kinds: general and specific questions on satisfaction with police. Both direct and indirect measures need to be used to evaluate police performance. The fact that police undertake a broad array of work calls for a multidimensional approach to measuring police performance. Service Standards for Transfer Payment Programs.
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