Topic
Why trust in the police matters, and how it is won or lost.
11 articles · All topics →
A fastener manufacturer's PR ranking named Worthing the worst town in the UK for shoplifting. The real driver was a police reporting scheme working as intended — and the force didn't say so for fourteen months. A case study in reading crime data, and in explaining it before someone else does.
Procedural justice is the best-evidenced idea in modern policing — how an officer runs an encounter shapes trust and compliance more than what the encounter decides. A working guide for leaders and policy makers on what it actually is, the trials that test it, what the evidence doesn't yet show, and a simple way to get it into a uniformed officer's head before their next interaction with the public.
Surveys tell us whether public confidence in the police rose or fell. This dataset shows the language that ran alongside it — a quarter-century of UK news headlines about the police, reduced to words, tone and themes. The two curves turn out not to be the same shape.
Alex Murray spent a career investigating murders and running counter-terrorism operations, then built the institution that asked British policing a harder question: does any of this actually work? A profile of the founder of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing.
A mother's six-year campaign turned the Manchester Arena attack into the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 — Martyn's Law. A plain-English guide to what the law says, where it is on the road to enforcement, what it means for businesses, police officers and police leaders — and a practical, provisional checklist for getting a venue ready.
In 1981 Lawrence Sherman ran a domestic violence call as a scientific experiment, and policing was never quite the same. A profile of the American criminologist who argued that the police should be tested like medicine — and who taught the officers, Alex Murray among them, who carried the idea into British policing.
Every week a cheerful BBC radio programme takes a number that has been confidently waved around in the news and asks the rude question: is that actually true? A fond appreciation of More or Less and its host Tim Harford — and of the surprisingly useful habits it teaches anyone who has to think about statistics, policing ones included.
In 1829 a Home Secretary persuaded a suspicious country to accept the first modern police force — unarmed, in plain blue, and answerable to the public rather than the Crown. A profile of Sir Robert Peel and the idea that still underwrites British policing: that the police are only ever the public in uniform.
The Guarantee borrows the language of evidence — data-guided presence, hotspot patrolling. But it folds together two different jobs. A named officer per ward builds confidence. Hotspot patrolling cuts crime. The evidence for each is strong and specific, and the design honours it in some places and departs from it in others.
Clear CCTV, a registration plate, precise timestamps — and still “case closed, no suspect identified”. How fuel theft became effectively decriminalised.
Delivered well, neighbourhood policing produces “quick, large and sustained” gains in public confidence. The evidence behind that claim, weighed.
