Article Highlights
Law enforcement agencies often have to maintain channels for ongoing communication with the public. One of the most important channels is community feedback surveys.
Police-community interaction surveys show police departments how the local community feels about their level of service. It can also give police leadership an idea of how to improve those relationships.
In this article, we'll discuss how community satisfaction surveys work, how to build them, why knowing your audience is important, and what kinds of questions you should ask in your surveys.
A community satisfaction survey assesses the opinions and attitudes of residents about the performance of their local police department. It asks questions about the department's quality of service, each person's overall satisfaction with the department, their perceptions of crime and safety, and their level of confidence in the police.
Surveys are disseminated and conducted via paper, phone, text, or online. Questions are usually answered on a 5-point scale, called a Likert scale, and include options like “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neutral,” “disagree,” and “strongly disagree.” Or they ask subjects to rate something "with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best."
Police-community interaction surveys gather feedback from a statistically representative sample of local residents. You don't need to ask everyone in the community, but you need enough people representing your community's demographic makeup, including age, race, and nationality. By getting results from this cross-section of the community, you can get a good idea of how the community feels as a whole. The results help identify strengths and areas of improvement and provide better insight into the community's needs.
With this information, department leadership can better understand the quality of police services and find areas of community policing to improve. Best of all, the surveys offer opportunities for community engagement, which can go a long way toward building and improving trust in the community.
When building your citizen satisfaction survey, you first need to determine the objective of the survey. What do you want to know? What are you hoping to measure?
Some of the areas you can measure include:
Decide what you want to measure. Do you want an objective, quantitative survey where questions have a limited number of choices, like the 5-point Likert scale?
Or do you want a qualitative, open-ended survey with questions like, "What are some of the most important characteristics a police officer should have?" or "What are some areas of improvement you would suggest for this department?" Survey takers can type in their answers.
You also want to know who your audience is. This means knowing the demographics of your city. Your questions should fit who you are speaking to and meet your audience where they are. This means sending surveys with the method your community is most likely to use in their daily life.
That also means collecting demographic data on your surveys. This way, you can understand how different groups within the community feel about your department and their experiences with your officers. You can segment responses by various demographic factors to measure the satisfaction of each group.
Finally, decide on the medium for delivering your community satisfaction surveys. A mix of platforms is ideal – some are easier and inexpensive, while others are more thorough and yield more complete results.
For example, you can deliver short surveys via phone and text, but they need to be brief. You can also ask people to fill out a survey online or through paper-and-pen surveys sent via mail.
It's best to use a variety of approaches to maximize the amount and quality of responses to get back. Use pen-and-paper surveys when you want to hear from your less tech-savvy citizens, and send automated text surveys when you want real-time information about interactions with your department.
There are a number of different questions to ask on your community feedback surveys, but it's important to be selective in the number you ask. It's easy to get carried away and create a 100-question survey. That may give you a wealth of information, but no one will want to answer all those questions. Similarly, you can get people to respond to a 3-question text survey, but that may not yield enough information.
Choose the questions and the categories you want to focus on first. Be strategic: focus on the highest priorities and pick a few questions from the best categories for that particular survey.
This is the best way to see the big picture for your department. How is the department operating as a whole? This won't identify specific problem areas but can show how the community views the department in general.
Trust is an important facet of community relations, and it should be a top survey priority, especially if your agency is making special efforts in this area.
This will help you see how the department performs in specific neighborhoods and how victims feel about the way they are treated by your officers.
These questions are a great way to understand citizen perceptions of safety in their communities. Consider comparing actual crime statistics to the survey results in those same neighborhoods.
Questions about bias show you how your community views the agency’s treatment of protected classes and specific groups of citizens. It's also a good idea to track the respondents' demographic data to find any correlations here.
It’s important to understand how the community views your agency’s level of transparency and accountability around officer conduct.
Most departments spend a lot of time and energy focusing on community engagement through community policing efforts, community programs, and school visits. Are these efforts paying off? Do they have the positive results you'd like? Ask these questions to get better insight into your community engagement efforts.
Citizen satisfaction surveys can reveal things about your community-departmental relations that you could never find out just by asking a few people or tuning in to local media. A great satisfaction survey will reach an accurate cross-section of the community, show you the prevailing attitudes about your department, and give you actionable insight into how you can improve. Learn how PowerEngage can help you create community feedback surveys with industry-leading response rates.