West Midlands Police: Trust and Confidence Panel Survey
Background & Context
West Midlands Police wanted to explore residents’ confidence and trust in local policing, especially in the context of controversy around the Aston Villa/Maccabi Tel Aviv football game which led to the resignation of the Police and Crime Commissioner.
A larger body of work was commissioned by the OPCC, while this project was designed to get a quick snapshot for WMP.
Approach
This was a mixed methods project, including a quantitative panel survey and qualitative focus groups.
The panel survey targeted a representative sample of West Midlands residents across the 7 LPAs within the West Midlands (Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, Wolverhampton). Quotas were set on LPA, ethnicity, age and gender to be representative of the West Midlands as a whole. Data checks were conducted to ensure responses were high quality and valid (e.g. checking postcodes matched the LPA selected).
The focus groups were split across the 7 LPAs, as such:
Group 1: Birmingham
Group 2: Coventry and Solihull
Group 3: Dudley and Sandwell
Group 4: Walsall and Wolverhampton
Residents in each LPA were recruited from panel respondents to form a diverse range of West Midlands residents across demographies and geography, with some consideration for a balance of attitudes towards WMP.
Outputs
We conducted thematic analysis on the focus groups and cross-checked insights in themes across the qualitative and quantitative research in order to add nuance to the headline figures generated in the sample. This analysis fed into a PowerPoint report.
This report combined qualitative and quantitative insight to answer the key research questions around headline trust and confidence, the drivers and determinents of these, and perceptions of what WMP may be able to do and commnicate in order to improve trust and confidence. This included insights around the impact of the Aston Villa / Maccabi Tel Aviv controversy on residents’ confidence and trust.
A version of this report was presented to the Local Policing Governance Group, with follow-up presentations planned.
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