Claim: Trust in the police has shot up and is the highest it has ever been.

Verdict: Trust in the police today is slightly higher than the average over the past decade, but it is not the highest it has been during this time.

The public’s trust in police has seemingly been on everybody’s lips in recent weeks, making its way into parliamentary debates, podcasts and interviews.

Last week, while defending beleaguered home affairs minister Byron Camilleri, Robert Abela said that trust in the police had “shot up” and that people’s trust in the police is “the highest it has ever been”.

Just days earlier, during a heated debate on a Times Talk, Jason Micallef also touched upon the issue, pointing to EU studies to say “look at which institution people trust most in this country, look at how high people’s level of trust in the police is”.

The issue arose again in the following week’s Times Talk podcast, in which foreign minister Ian Borg said that “the police enjoy more trust than newspapers and politicians, so people think the police are doing their job”.

Meanwhile, the topic was also raised at various junctures by MPs from both sides of the house as they bickered in parliament over proposed changes to magisterial inquiries and a recent drug heist at the army's barracks.

How is trust in police measured?

Like most other issues that are subjective at heart, trust in police is typically gauged through scientific surveys in which people are asked to rank their trust against a pre-set scale.

In Malta, there are two surveys that have attempted to do this in recent years, at least on a nationwide basis.

The first is the Eurobarometer survey which, twice a year, asks people across Europe to express their views on a whole host of public institutions, including the police.

The second is a 2022 survey carried out by Malta’s National Statistics Office in collaboration with the police, in which people were asked about their experience with law enforcement.

Do people trust the police?

According to the NSO survey, they overwhelmingly do, albeit relatively few say they have blind faith in the police.

Some 90% said they have some degree of trust in the police, with just under half of them (45%) describing it as a “moderate” level of trust.

The remaining half described their level of trust as either “high” (almost 37%) or “extreme” (8%). Meanwhile, only 2% say they have no trust in the police whatsoever.

And when asked whether they have a positive or negative view of the police, a little over half said that they have either a “positive” (44%) or “very positive” (11%) view of the police force, compared to almost 9% who view the police negatively and 36% who are on the fence.

The survey digs deeper, asking why some people don’t trust the police (“they are never around,” many complain) and whether people who had some sort of contact with the police had a good or bad experience.

But, unlike the Eurobarometer survey, this study was only carried out once, making it impossible to tell whether the public’s trust in the police has grown or shrunk over time.

So what does the EU survey say?

Meanwhile, the Eurobarometer study keeps things far more straightforward, simply asking respondents whether or not they tend to trust the police.

The most recent edition, published late last year, found that almost two-thirds of people in Malta (63%) say they tend to trust the police, while just over a third (36%) say they tend not to trust them.

This places the police second only to the army as Malta’s most trusted institution, well ahead of political parties, the government, the justice system and parliament, among others.

But things look a little less rosy when comparing Malta’s trust in the police to that of people in other EU member states.

Malta’s level of trust is 10 percentage points beneath the EU-wide average of 73%, with the survey finding that only seven EU countries trust their police force less than the Maltese.

Is trust in the police higher than it has ever been?

Not according to the Eurobarometer survey.

The survey suggests that trust in the police has ebbed and flowed over the past decade or so, sometimes rising as high as 70% (in the winter of 2022, for instance), before dipping as low as 52% (just a handful of months later).

Today’s 63% is slightly above Malta’s average over the past decade but has been topped on several other occasions over the years, including throughout 2022 and in late 2018 and early 2019.

Nor is it correct to say, as Abela argued, that trust in the police has “shot up” under Camilleri’s watchful eye.

When Camilleri was put in charge of the police in early 2020, he inherited a police force that was trusted by some 59% of the public, according to a Eurobarometer survey published in late 2019.

Since then, nine other Eurobarometer surveys have been published, with trust in the police averaging out at…59%.

And throughout the nine Eurobarometer surveys prior to Camilleri’s appointment, the average trust in the police was only marginally higher, at 60%.

This suggests that trust in the police has remained roughly unchanged over the past decade, rising or dipping slightly from time to time as events unfold.

How this compares to the previous decade is anybody’s guess since Eurobarometer did not consistently collect data about trust in police prior to 2014.

Verdict

National data shows that 90% of the public trust the police, although half of these say they have “moderate” trust. Only 2% say they have no trust in the police at all.

However, this survey was only carried out once, making it impossible to use it to gauge whether trust in the police has increased or decreased over time.

Another more frequent, EU-wide survey has asked the Maltese whether they trust the police several times over the past decade.

This survey finds that today’s trust level is slightly above its average for the past decade, but has been bettered on several other occasions. It also remains lower than the EU-wide average.

It also shows that, despite rising and dipping from time to time, trust levels have remained broadly unchanged over the past decade.

Nonetheless, the police remain amongst Malta’s most trusted institutions.

The claim is therefore mostly false because the evidence generally refutes the claim, although some minor aspects of the claim may be accurate.

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