What matters to the public when they call the police? Insights from a call centre

Abstract

Contact with the police impacts upon public judgements of the police. The experiences of those who contact the public police by telephone concerning non-emergency issues have received little attention in the existing literature. This article presents findings from a qualitative examination of a police Constabulary's non-emergency call-handling processes, exploring some of the factors which shaped the contact experienced through this channel. Interviews were conducted with 70 members of the public who contacted the Constabulary through its call centre, with the police call-handlers who answered some of these calls, and with call centre supervisors and senior managers. Police call-handlers were positive about their jobs, despite acknowledging the somewhat repetitive nature of the work, as they believed they were helping the public by providing a valuable, worthwhile service. Callers were primarily concerned with how they were treated and noted that the most memorable and helpful components of their calls to the police were the ways in which call-handlers conveyed empathy, understanding, interest, sensitivity and politeness. Having a call answered in under 40 seconds, one of the quantitative performance targets used to measure performance in the police call centre, appeared to be less important to callers. The article concludes by arguing that quantitative targets are ill-suited to measuring and supporting the kind of emotional labour that call-handlers undertake and the emotional engagement that callers value. Providing high-quality service should be the priority for police call centres, as this is likely to generate positive judgements of the police.

Keywords:

• police call-handling
• public opinion of the police
• procedural legitimacy
• contact management

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Professor Richard Young for his guidance and supervision and the participating police Constabulary and members of the public for their contribution to this research.

Notes

1. A matter was defined as non-emergency when the Constabulary did not deem it sufficiently serious to require an immediate response. Calls concerning non-emergency issues, if made to the ‘999’ emergency telephone number would be transferred to the Constabulary's non-emergency call centre and handled in the same manner as those made directly via the non-emergency number. Call-handlers in the non-emergency call centre would occasionally receive calls from the public which the Constabulary regarded as ‘emergency’. Upon identifying a matter as an emergency, a non-emergency call-handler would promptly transfer the call to the Constabulary's emergency call centre, a separate operation that deals solely with ‘999’ emergency calls (which are not considered by this research).

2. The other 20 calls were enquiries that did not require the completion of a crime report.

3. Where a research participant is cited a single letter (to illustrate their participant group) followed by a unique number is included so that readers can distinguish between respondents. The letters used in these reference codes are ‘C’ for callers and ‘CH’ for call-handlers.

4. There were 145 callers invited to take part in this study.

5. The Constabulary did not store data on the length of hold periods for individual calls, so the actual length of waiting periods could not be verified.