Annotated Charts, Part II: Confidence in the Police and Criminal Justice System, 1993-2023

Gallup has been asking Americans about their confidence in institutions for over 30 years. Media articles sometimes misinterpret these surveys as being about trust in institutions, but trust and confidence aren't the same thing. While both involve probability judgments that a person or institution will meet positive expectations, trust also implies an evaluation of intention or character. For example, to have confidence in the police is to expect them to get the job done: deter, catch and arrest criminals. To trust the police is to expect them to get the job done and to be honest, conscientious, and not crooked or violent. At least that’s my list of what makes a cop trustworthy.

It’s possible to have confidence in police, because they do a pretty good job of catching the bad guys but still not trust them, because they also harm or harass good guys. Yes, the concepts overlap to an extent and some survey respondents may not see a difference, but I’ve belabored this point long enough. Let’s see how Gallup respondents answer the question, “Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in the police -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?”:

Mmm…pretty steady in the confidence department until around 2017, then a downward trend, accelerating since 2020. I put the “civil unrest” lines in to see if confidence in police dipped after periods of anti-police unrest. No pattern there until 2020, when high confidence responses (“quite a lot or a great deal”) dipped 5 points over the period of 2020 - 2023 and middling confidence (“some”) rose by 5 points.

A similar post-2020 pattern can be found in respondents’ confidence levels regarding the US criminal justice system:

Actually, the criminal justice system suffered a greater loss of confidence over the period of 2020 - 2023 than the police did: high confidence fell 7 points, while very little or no confidence rose 9 points. This is somewhat surprising, since the 2020 unrest focused more on police brutality than on flaws in the criminal justice system (admittedly, a somewhat vague term).