THUNDER BAY - In an effort to further gauge the public’s perceptions of policing in the community, the Thunder Bay Police Service will be updating its satisfaction survey to include questions about trust.
“I think that aspect is important to measure at this juncture in terms of our service delivery,” said acting Thunder Bay Police Service chief, Sylvie Hauth.
As part of its organizational change project, which was launched last year to create more inclusion and diversity on the local force, the Thunder Bay Police Service will be asking the public about its trust in the police in an upcoming satisfaction survey.
Leisa Desmoulins, a consultant with the Thunder Bay Police Service, presented an update on the organizational change project to the Thunder Bay Police Service Board on Tuesday.
The police service and the city of Thunder Bay conduct surveys on policing on alternate years. The new survey will build on existing surveys, but delve a little deeper into other public perceptions.
“Satisfaction looks at the quality of service delivery, is it effective, is it efficient, but trust goes a little bit deeper and looks at if people believe they are treated fairly, if police treat them fairly, and that they do their work fairly,” Desmoulins said. “We want to get a gauge of that because we want to look at that for our diversity initiative.”
The specific questions have not been developed yet, but the organizational change project has been looking to what the Regina Police has done in developing the survey. Desmoulins said she will also look at the General Social Survey on victimization from Statistics Canada that includes questions about trust.
“Based on everything that we’ve been through as a service in the last year and the added scrutiny, we wanted to ensure that moving forward, not only through our business plan, but through out survey that we added that component,” Hauth said.
Hauth added that she thinks the survey will be very beneficial for understanding how satisfied people are with policing services.
“When you talk about trust with the police, are people willing to report crimes, are they willing to approach us, do they think we are effective with how we work with them?” she said.
Desmoulins expects the survey to be sent out to the public in December and in order to get the best representation of the community’s perceptions, she is hoping to use a larger sample size.
“One of the things the Regina Police Service told us about was that they oversampled,” she said. “They looked at making sure they had a wide range of groups of people that they are looking at instead of looking at a random sample, which may or may not include a different group sin a community, so we are going to oversample.”
If the survey is successful, Hauth said they might look at conducting it on a yearly basis.
