Are Informed Citizens More Trusting? Transparency of Performance Data and Trust Towards a British Police Force

David Mason (), Carola Hillenbrand () and Kevin Money ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2014, vol. 122, issue 2, 341 pages

Abstract: In Britain, substantial cuts in police budgets alongside controversial handling of incidents such as politically sensitive enquiries, public disorder and relations with the media have recently triggered much debate about public knowledge and trust in the police. To date, however, little academic research has investigated how knowledge of police performance impacts citizens’ trust. We address this long-standing lacuna by exploring citizens’ trust before and after exposure to real performance data in the context of a British police force. The results reveal that being informed of performance data affects citizens’ trust significantly. Furthermore, direction and degree of change in trust are related to variations across the different elements of the reported performance criteria. Interestingly, the volatility of citizens’ trust is related to initial performance perceptions (such that citizens with low initial perceptions of police performance react more significantly to evidence of both good and bad performance than citizens with high initial perceptions), and citizens’ intentions to support the police do not always correlate with their cognitive and affective trust towards the police. In discussing our findings, we explore the implications of how being transparent with performance data can both hinder and be helpful in developing citizens’ trust towards a public organisation such as the police. From our study, we pose a number of ethical challenges that practitioners face when deciding what data to highlight, to whom, and for what purpose. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Public sector; Trust; Performance; Transparency; New public management; Stakeholder relationships; Corporate responsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1702-6

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