Policing of migrants and minorities. The final aspect of the surveys outlined here relates to the policing of migrants and/or minorities and, more broadly, the experience of police among all respondents across the seven countries. Expanding on the suite of questions fielded in the ESS, the FIDUCIA survey will include a set of questions concerning respondent’s experiences of contact with the police. These will cover both police-initiated contact (e.g. a street stop) as well as contact initiated by the respondent themself, and will include items on incidence, frequency and assessment of the quality of the interaction (e.g. satisfaction with the way the police behaved).
Policing of migrants and minorities. (contact with police) The ‘core’ survey will contain items on: Police-initiated contact (incidence and frequency) (Q21 and Q22) Perceived fairness of police during most recent police-initiated contact (Q24) Self-initiated contact (incidence and frequency) (Q28 ad Q29) Perceived fairness of police during most recent self-initiated contact (Q32) The expanded version of the questionnaire will add items on: Overall satisfaction with most recent police- and/or self-initiated contact (Q23 and Q30) Measures of outcome satisfaction across both types of contact. (Q24, Q26, Q33
Policing of migrants and minorities. Hypotheses in relation to the policing of migrants and minorities are laid out below. Recall that the sample size of minority and/or immigrant groups is likely to be small in most if not all of the FIDUCIA survey countries – this will affect the ability of analysis to address these hypotheses, although it is hard to be certain of this issue before the data are collected. People from ethnic minority groups are more likely to have experienced police- initiated contact than their majority group counterparts. Migrants to a country are more likely to have experienced police-initiated contact then their counterparts born in that country. Ethnic minority and migrant respondents will be less satisfied with contact with police. Ethnicity and immigration status will be associated with trust in, and views on the legitimacy of, police. However it is not clear that this will necessarily be a negative association – work in the UK, for example, tends to find that while some minority groups have lower levels of trust in the police than the White majority, some have more trust (e.g. Bradford et al. 2009), pointing to a complex relationship between ethnicity, immigration history and relationships with the criminal justice system.
