According to YouGov the several high-profile murders of young women, including that of Sarah Everard by Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens, coupled with botched responses from police commanders, reveals the extent of the damage this has caused to public confidence.
YouGov routinely asks the British public their confidence in the police to deal with crime in their local area, and for the first time since we started asking in July 2019 more people are now unconfident in the police (48%) than confident (43%).
This is a stark decrease of 10 points across a year, when 53% had a lot/fair amount of confidence and 40% had not very much or none. However, between that survey and one at the end of the month – a period which coincided with Sarah Everard’s murder – these figures narrowed, and had remained at that level until deteriorating further this month.
 This decline in confidence is actually highest among men, with the number of men lacking confidence in the police increasing from 48% in September to 53% now. Among women there has been a more modest shift, from 40% to 43%.
With this in mind, we asked Brits about their trust in the police in general, the Met, local forces and individual police officers. The police in general are viewed by the public relatively positively, with two thirds of the sample saying they trust them, and only one third saying they don’t. People outside of London give similar results when asked about their local police force, and individual police officers are trusted by just over a half of their population.
But, when asked specifically about the Metropolitan Police in London, trust dramatically decreases. Only 33% of the British public trust the Met, and 42% say they do not. Distrust is highest among 18-24 year olds, at 51% to 23%. Distrust is also higher amongst men (46%), than women (37%), a pattern witnessed across all of our measures of trust towards police. Labour voters have less trust in the Metropolitan police (distrusting them by 29% to 49%) than Conservative voters, who are divided on the issue (by 38% to 38%).
Londoners, however, remain for the most part confident in the Met, with 57% trusting them vs 39% distrusting them. This stands in contrast to Britons elsewhere, who tend to view the force with suspicion.
One of the key reasons for regular breakdowns in the rlationship between many of the public and the police centres upon the issue of Authoritarian Personality
The typical white police officer is generally viewed as cynical, suspicious, conservative, and bigoted (authoritarian characteristics).
The video below is a classic example.
This perfectly sums up the state of the UK right now
— Emma Smart (@smartyfish) March 7, 2023
???? Nature enclosed, being destroyed
???? State-ordered police criminalising ordinary people non-violently protesting
✊ Determined individuals who will not be bullied & silenced
It’s time to pick a side- trumpet or truncheon? https://t.co/KUeVt9ZL5j
People Who Become Police Officers Tend to Have Authoritarian Personality Characteristics
Criminologists, psychologists and other social scientists have compiled a large amount of data on the relationship between police behaviour and authoritarianism. This information is readily available and highly accessible to the general public. However, it is not discussed by the corporate news media because the facts cannot be readily reconciled with the mythologies that surround (and protect) the police.
One of the most prominent and influential studies of the twentieth century on the link between the police and authoritarian traits by Robert Balch found the following characteristics dominant amongst officers
a. Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian Submission: submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealised moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian Aggression: tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception: opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.
e. Superstition and Stereotypy: the belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and “toughness”: preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalised attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
g. Destructiveness and Cynicism: generalised hostility, vilification of the human.
h. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
i. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings on.”
These characterists are very much revealed by the officer in the above clip. A woman blows a toy trumpet. An officer tells her to stop. She refuses. The officer arrests her. The woman failed to do as she was told even though her behaviour is not illegal. The officer instead of attempting to form a relationship of respect responded in an authoritarian manner.
As the following examples also reveal the police force is a home for some very unsavoury people. Not only can these types of people flourish in their criminal activities but they are protected by those around them.
And doing the dirty work of other authoritarians
It is a very challenging job having to deal with people who find many of the laws in our society unfair and inhibiting (approx seventy per cent of UK laws seek to protect those with the most property over those with the least or none). However, when one signs up to be a police officer they do as they are told by those who seek mostly to protect what they have and keep it away from others. This is how our system has worked for centuries even before the police as an institution arrived.
If we expect the police to be on our side all or most of the time we are very much mistaken. The failure to investigate, detect and solve the majority of crimes that occur is beyond them. They do have the resources or the priority. They know that and we know that which is why so many distrust them.
Douglas James
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