This is where the applied psychology comes in. If the perpetrator is arrested, charged and convicted, the victim will be happy. This seems reasonable, and in my experience many officers believe it to be true.
In most cases they do. Others are crime detection and crime reduction, which are both legitimate and desirable outcomes, depending on how they are pursued. The interesting conclusion is that not investigating crime does not necessarily undermine victim satisfaction. It depends very much on how it the exchange between the police and the victim — be it in person or remotely — is handled.
I remember talking in a focus group to a man whose car had been broken into, resulting in theft and damage. When he said the police had not investigated the crime, I asked him how he felt about it.
His answer was interesting. In that case, failure to arrest the offender can be a source of dissatisfaction. This is an increasing problem with the widespread use of CCTV.
A few years ago a friend of mine came home late in the evening to find that a window at the back of her house had been broken, and she had been burgled. She called the police, and an officer arrived within twenty minutes. He looked around, took some details, reported the crime, and went away, telling her that a scene of crime officer SOCO would be round in the morning. So far, so good: my friend was impressed with the police response. When the SOCO came round next morning, he examined the scene, dusting various surfaces for fingerprints, then went outside to examine the entry point, accompanied by my friend.
Other factors are much more important. So what does make a difference? And how do we know? The police in England and Wales started measuring victim satisfaction about thirty years ago, using a questionnaire developed by the Association of Chief Police Officers Quality of Service subcommittee.
This questionnaire was quite short, and was centred on a five-point satisfaction scale, with a few other questions thrown in about the nature of the crime and demographic details of the respondent.
In the jargon of performance management, it measured an outcome what we can achieve, victim satisfaction in this case but ignored the outputs what we do that might contribute to the outcome. What a missed opportunity! But a questionnaire survey of victim satisfaction provides the ideal testing ground for understanding the dynamics of performance: if you ask the right questions, you can find out what makes the difference.
SMSR were running the Humberside Police survey of burglary victims, and I managed to wangle the opportunity to play around a bit with the questionnaire. But the most important change was a series of additional questions that I persuaded them to include in the questionnaire. These questions asked the victim what the police actually did in response to the crime.
But some of the questions worked well. For example, I asked if the police had given the victim any practical help following the crime. That was a decent question, it worked well. What do I mean by that, that the question worked well?
So what was that purpose? The importance of this finding is obvious. If we know there is something the police do in this case, giving practical help, an output which makes a difference to victim satisfaction the outcome , it suggests that if more victims were to be given practical help, then more would be satisfied.
This translation of research findings into action is at the heart of any evidence-based approach. A reassured victim is significantly and substantially more likely to be a satisfied victim. Furthermore, a reassured victim is significantly more likely to be very or completely satisfied rather than merely fairly satisfied — hence the value of the seven point scale. However suggestive this finding was, it was from a small sample a little over three hundred from only one police force, and related only to burglary victims.
But soon afterwards, two other larger police forces incorporated my reassurance question along with a series of other output questions into their victim surveys, covering victims of car crime, violent crime and hate crime, as well as burglary. The analysis of the data from both surveys with a combined sample size of over ten thousand pointed clearly to the same conclusion: again, reassurance was consistently the most powerful predictor of victim satisfaction.
The satisfaction scales were also extended from five to seven points. Since then I have had the opportunity to analyse USS data from different police forces at different times. All the data and by now my aggregate sample exceeds , point to the same conclusion: consistently, across time and between police forces, reassurance is by far the biggest predictor of victim satisfaction. So if you want to improve victim satisfaction, provide reassurance to your victims. Procedural justice is then examined in conjunction with distributive justice to determine if there are independent or interactive effects between the two.
Study participants included 1, victims of violent crime, who experienced a range of violent crimes. Victim satisfaction was measured as a scale variable, averaging the victim's level of satisfaction across four distinct periods of the criminal investigation and prosecution.
As expected, components of the system that granted the victim representation and a sense of accuracy in the process created a higher level of satisfaction for the victim. Also as expected, these variables remained important to the victim's satisfaction even when distributive justice variables were included. Unexpectedly, however, the variables that measured ethicality were unrelated to the victim's satisfaction, nor was sentence severity. Theoretical and policy implications, as well as directions for future research, are offered.
Study limitations, including the limited generalizability of the sample, also are discussed. Search DRUM. This Collection. Login Register.
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