Public confidence and engagement
We undertake regular surveys to assess the public's perceptions of the police, as well as their confidence in the police complaints system and our organisation.
We also seek regular feedback from our stakeholders to understand what is working well and where improvement may be needed. This feedback helps shape and inform our wider work to influence changes in policing, ensure accountability and encourage best practice and high standards of service. The surveys have been an important tool for measuring our progress.
Public Perceptions Tracker
We carry out surveys with members of the public to ask their view of us as an organisation and about the police complaints system. We currently work with Yonder, an independent research organisation, to carry out these surveys.
The data collected allows us to track levels of public confidence and provides a detailed insight into the public’s confidence in the police complaints system. We call this our Public Perceptions Tracker (PPT) and we publish a summary report each year. The results from the survey help us to assess the impact our work is having. We also use the data to support our policy, engagement and communications work.
We ask core questions that cover the following topics:
- awareness of the IOPC
- people’s perception of our independence
- how likely people are to make a complaint about the police
- their views about how the police deal with complaints
Additional questions have also been asked around the value of IOPC’s independent investigations.
The key findings for 2024/25 include:
- Half of the pubic say they feel positive towards the police (49%) and this sentiment has remained stable over the last three years.
- 48% of the public say they were not confidence in the police dealing fairly with complaints made against them (versus 42% who were confident).
- A majority of the public say that they would complain if unhappy about an officer’s behaviour towards them.
- Awareness of the IOPC is at the highest level since we were created but remains below the level when we were the IPCC.
- A majority of the public think that the IOPC is completely or somewhat independent of the police (70%).
Previous summary reports are available below. Public confidence surveys from before 2018 are available on the National Archives site.
