The police and the public : in-depth essays based on Police Barometer Survey data, Vol. I

Abstract

The Police Barometer Survey (PBS, 1999–2022, continues) underwent a significant methodological change in 2022. Beginning from the 2022 sweep, the biennial cross-section surveys are based on random sampling methodology and a combination of web-based and traditional surface mail surveys. The earlier surveys have been based on quota sampling methodology and computer assisted personal interviews (CAPIs). At the same time, the sample size expanded. In the latest survey, in the autumn of 2022, it was 8,500, with a response rate of 47.6% (4,044/8,500). In earlier surveys, approximately 1,000 persons were interviewed for each cross-section study.

Due to random sampling methodology, the data of the renewed study have a robust statistical basis, with plenty of opportunities for further scholarly research. This book seizes some of these opportunities. It consists of three in-depth essays, all of which are based on the latest PBS 2022 data set. It will be followed by volume II in 2025, with another set of similar essays.

The first essay considers Public Austerity Programs and Citizens’ Trust in the Operation of the Police. Downsizing in the police was noticeable in Finland, in the early to mid-2010s. The number of police officers was reduced by approximately 7–9% from 2008 to 2017, depending on the way one computes the scale of downsizing. The number of police officers has not fully recovered to the level of 2008, even today (by the end of 2023). There are theoretical reasons to believe that such a downsizing has detrimental effects on the number of outputs of the police, and thus also on the accessibility of police services. Earlier evidence on the matter has been quantitative in nature. In the new PBS, the effect can now be detected in qualitative data. In the PBS 2022, the respondents were asked an open-ended question on trust in the operation of the police. According to the standard PBS report by the Ministry of the Interior (2023),1 the most common reason for distrust in the operation of the police expressed by the respondents was, a bit surprisingly, the lack of resources of the police. Approximately 12.9% of the respondents who answered the open-ended question referred to this reason (“shortage of resources of the police,” “the number of police officers being too low,” “appropriations of the police being insufficient,” etc.).

The authors of the essay reanalyzed and recorded the qualitative data of the latest PBS study in their entirety (N = 2,302 open-ended answers / text records), in order to confirm the number of records where respondents referred to resource shortages of the police as a reason for distrust in the operation of the police. The authors used the same data and essentially the same coding criteria as the researchers of the standard report by the Ministry of the Interior (2023). According to the final estimate of the new study, approximately 12.3% of the respondents referred to resource shortages as a reason for their lack of trust in the operation of the police. The authors also considered the share of respondents who referred to resource shortages of the police and to one (or more) of the four services domains of the police as domains suffering from scarcity: permits and licenses services of the police, traffic enforcement, criminal investigation, and surveillance and emergency operations. The authors conclude the essay by providing the reader with a detailed descriptive account of the answers within each of these four domains.

The general estimate by the authors came close to the original estimate by the Ministry of the Interior (2023), thus confirming the conclusions of the original study. Concern over the resources of the police is, apparently, one of the factors that affect citizens’ distrust in the operation of the police, perhaps the major factor.

The services-specific estimates revealed that the respondents were primarily concerned with the state of criminal investigation, and surveillance and emergency operations of the police, not so much with permits and licenses services, nor with traffic enforcement. The authors note that, differences between the different services domains of the police are even higher, if considered against the volume of services-specific police contacts of the citizens. The number of yearly police-public contacts is much higher in the domain of permits and licenses services than in the other domains, yet resource shortages were detected elsewhere—in criminal investigation and in surveillance and emergency operations.

The second essay analyzes The Dark Side of the Dark Figure of Crime. A Study of Victims Who Leave Crimes Unreported Out of Fear of Reprisal. There were 121 victimized persons in the PBS 2022 data set who had left at least one crime unreported for the reason of fear of reprisal (victimization over lifetime). The authors of the essay asked a simple question: how to characterize these victimized persons? Specifically, what are their key demographic features, in terms of age and gender, compared to other victims of crime? Are they economically disadvantaged or are they well-to-do, considering their education, labor market status, and yearly gross income? Where do they come from, as regards the police districts of mainland Finland?

There was also a further, theoretically driven research question in the essay. What is the effect of former life experiences on fear-based non-reporting? Specifically, what is the predictive power of violent crimes experienced earlier on in life, in this respect—assaults, sexual offences, and armed threats experienced over lifetime? Based on the prospect theory2 and the theory of availability heuristic,3 both of which have been originally developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s, the authors hypothesized that fear-based non-reporting is a function of violent crime victimization. This, indeed, proved to be the case. Violent crime victimization was by far the most significant predictor of fear-based non-reporting.

The third essay, Protection. A Key to the Code of Witness Intimidation? analyzes intimidation of people who have taken part in the criminal procedure as victims or witnesses. The primary interest of the study was in the question of, whether or not the victims of intimidation report the incident of intimidation to the police. There are two factors related to victims’ and witnesses’ confidence in the police that could be expected to affect their willingness to report the incident of intimidation. If the victims of intimidation have confidence in the ability of the police to protect people from violence in situations characterized by a serious threat, such as a death threat, and if they have confidence in the procedural justice of the police, their propensity to report can be expected to be higher than average. The authors tested the hypotheses with the help of the PBS data, relying on perceived protection and perceived procedural justice variables, originally developed in the Euro-Justis project (2008–2011) for the benefit of the European Social Survey’s 2010 sweep.

The perceived procedural justice hypothesis was confirmed for no demographic group, in within-group non-parametric tests. The perceived protection hypothesis was confirmed for the group of female victims of intimidation, but not for any other demographic group. Women who had reported the incident of intimidation had a significantly higher confidence in the ability of the police to protect people from violence than women who had remained silent. Female victims of intimidation in particular, then, seem to benefit from the feeling of being protected.

The Data The data of the PBS, including their history, are comprehensively depicted in the standard report by the Ministry of the Interior (2023, pp. 31–44). The essays of this book, furthermore, give a detailed description of their own data subsets. We do not revisit the characteristics of the data in these introductory notes. A few further aspects of the data, however, deserve to be noted here. The PBS data are valuable in that they combine elements of victimization studies (such as the National Crime Victimization Survey NCVS in the US) with elements of police-citizen contact studies (such as the Police–Public Contact Survey PPCS in the US), much in the vein of the Nationella Trygghetsundersökningen (NTU, in Sweden). This means that the scholars who use these data do not have to go through the laborious and often uncertain and risky process of merging data sets to each other (see, e.g., Slocum, 2018, who uses data from both the NCVS and the PPCS in her study).4 The sample size of the PBS is modest, compared to practically all other victimization and police-citizen contact surveys, such as the NCVS, the NTU, or the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). The quality of the data, however, is no different. Following the proposition of the Police University College of Finland (the planning partner of the PBS project), the Ministry of the Interior decided that the 2022 data set was to be collected and the analysis weights for the data set computed by Statistics Finland (the data collection partner of the project).

Statistics Finland used the database of the Digital and Population Data Services Agency of Finland in the data collection and random sampling procedure, supplementing the registers of the database with their own data. The analysis weights computed by Statistics Finland are used in all analyses of all essays of this book.

Acknowledgements and the Division of Labor We would like to thank the Ministry of the Interior for coordinating and funding the PBS project, thus making the project possible in its current form. Special thanks go to Senior Specialist Emilia Hämäläinen from the Ministry. Absolutely great work! We also want to thank the experts of Statistics Finland for their diligent work in gathering and preparing the data of the new PBS 2022, and for computing the analysis weights of the data. The project would not have been possible without Senior Statistician Johanna Koivula, Senior Statistician Henna Attila, and Senior Researcher Pauli Ollila. Finally, our thanks go to the peer-reviewers of the book. Ours is not a routine, but a heartfelt message here. We have rarely come across standards as high as this in peer-review work. The first two volumes of “The Police and the Public” have been designed and edited by the two authors in collaboration. The data of Chapter 1 in this book have been analyzed, first independently by both Jenita Rauta and Matti Vuorensyrjä, and then, in the final stage of the analysis, in collaboration by both authors, including the conclusions thereof. The entire text corpus of the book has been written by Matti Vuorensyrjä.

Second, Revised Edition In February 2025, an error was detected in the data that the Police Barometer Survey project had received from Statistics Finland (PBS, 2022). The error affected Chapter 3 of this book (Protection. A Key to the Code of Witness Intimidation?), especially the models presented in Table 3.2. The models were estimated anew with error-free data, and corresponding corrections were made to the text corpus of the book. The second, revised edition of the book results from this work. The key findings from the analysis stayed the same. In this sense, the damage was restricted. Female victims of intimidation still seem to benefit the most from the feeling of being protected.