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