Fewer believe that PSNI perform well – and big fall in confidence that ‘innocence before guilt’ being observed

The most recent government poll on attitudes to police, compiled by the Department of Justice and released today, shows that whilst there was a mild year-on-year dip in that key statistic, it comes against a general trend of improving confidence in policing, spanning many years.

Other striking statistics in the newly-released data is that perceptions of the police differ quite dramatically depending on the income of the people surveyed.

There has also been a long-term drop in the number of people who believe that the core principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is being observed.

The survey – officially titled ‘Perceptions of Policing and Justice: Findings from the 2018/19 Northern Ireland Safe Community Survey’ – asked 3,429 people their views on the police and justice system generally.

They were asked if they agreed with the following sentence: “The police do a very or fairly good job in NI as a whole”.

• The results show 69% of Catholics agreed, and 76% of Protestants agreed (although the department says there is a margin of error in the numbers, so the results may not be absolutely exact).

• The same question a year earlier had yielded results of 71% and 78%.

However, the police said this was not “statistically significant”, and the long term trend shows they have risen in their standing with the NI public.

•While the combined percentage of Catholics-and-Protestants who feel the PSNI performs “fairly to very good” now stands at 72%, back in 2003 the figure was just 58%.

When it comes to overall confidence in the criminal justice system, the poll asked whether people tended to agree or strongly agree with the following sentence: “The criminal justice system treats those accused of crime as innocent until proven guilty.”

• When the question was asked in 2007/08, 70% said yes.

• But by 2017/18 this had fallen to 61%.

• And then it plunged further to just 53% in 2018/19.

There are also big variations, not just year-on-year, but across different regions and classes.

• When asked if they believe the police do a “fairly good to very good job”, only 62% of people with a household income of under £10,000 agreed.

• When people with a household income of £50,000 or more were asked, the figure rose to 79%.

• The most satisfied council region was Lisburn and Castlereagh, where 79% of all respondents agreed police do a “fairly good to very good job”.

• The least satisfied region was Belfast, where the figure falls to 67%.

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