Increasing Public Confidence
Confidence in the CJS
Raising public confidence in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is one of the Government's key Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. Improving confidence is a priority because the CJS relies on public co-operation and involvement to function effectively.
The level of public confidence in the CJS is measured through the British Crime Survey (BCS). The BCS is a survey of adults in England and Wales about their experiences of crime, and each year roughly 50,000 individuals are interviewed. There are currently seven questions relating to confidence in the CJS, and one of these has been chosen as a key measure:
How confident are you that the CJS is effective in bringing people who have committed a crime to justice?
The level of public confidence is defined as the proportion who say that they are very or fairly confident that the CJS is effective in bringing offenders to justice.
The PSA target is to increase the level of confidence across England and Wales by the year ending March 2008 - from a baseline of 39% for the year ending March 2003. Each Local Criminal Justice Board has also set individual targets for improving levels of confidence in the CJS in their Area.
Performance on public confidence in the CJS for the year to March 2008 was at 44% which is stable in comparison to the CJS baseline of 43% for the year ending March 2005. This is a statistically significant increase on the PSA 2 baseline of 39% for 2002/03 and this target has been met.
Some caution is needed in assessing levels of change at a local level. Because the measure for confidence in the CJS is based on an attitude survey rather than factual information (such as the number of reported crimes), there is a margin of error due to the fact that only a proportion of the population (a sample) are interviewed. To account for the possibility that any difference between samples is due to different individuals being interviewed we use a concept known as statistical significance. This calculates the difference required between two samples for us to be able to say that the change is great enough to make it highly unlikely that this occurred simply by interviewing different individuals. If the difference is less than that required, we say that the increase/decrease is not statistically significant, i.e. the change may have occurred as a consequence of different individuals being interviewed rather than that the level of confidence has increased.