Search Results

This chapter looks at several important trends concerning religious leaders. Religious leadership is a less attractive career choice for young people than it used to be. The numbers of older clergy and of female clergy are higher than they were several decades ago. Moreover, public confidence in religious leaders has declined precipitously. Public confidence in other kinds of leaders has declined as well, but confidence in religious leaders has declined more than confidence in leaders of other institutions. All things considered, religious leaders have lost ground on several fronts in recent decades when it comes to its reputation and social prominence.

This chapter looks at key figures in the emerging anticommunist network and analyzes two early episodes: the Smith Committee attack on the National Labor Relations Board and its allies, and the Dies Committee attack on the consumer movement, especially the League of Women Shoppers and the Office of Price Administration. The power of the labor movement in stimulating the reaction against the New Deal is well known, but the consumer movement should be recognized as another major trigger. Women were important in the ascendance of both industrial unionism and organized consumerism, and conservatives highlighted women's role in an effort to undermine public confidence in those movements and their allied government agencies.

Following Jesica Santillan's death, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the nonprofit organization that oversees the country's organ allocation network, reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring public confidence in the transplant system. This chapter examines the historical formation of UNOS and analyzes why public confidence is a paramount priority for transplant policymakers. It discusses the cultural-technical organization of matching, the efforts to promote organ donation, and the politics and economics of organ allocation. Overall, the chapter explores how the matching of available organs with worthy recipients has historically intersected with American debates over scarcity, abundance, fairness, equality, and public confidence.

This chapter looks beyond criminal justice to wider reforms in government and public services – the transition from ‘old public administration’ to ‘new public management’, the mixed results it achieved and the areas for improvement. Prime Minister David Cameron has stated that he ‘wants one of the great legacies of the government to be the complete modernisation of our public services’. The proposed reforms consist mainly of cuts in public expenditure, contracting out services to create competition and allowing the ‘Big Society’ to take over functions previously performed by publicly funded statutory services. These changes mainly affect public services such as health, education and those provided by local government, and the same approach is being applied to criminal justice. The chapter considers in particular: policy making and legislation; the relationship between ministers and public servants; localisation and citizens' empowerment; the management of risk; promoting innovation; the use of research and expert advice; and the implications of outsourcing services to the private and voluntary sectors and the parameters that should be observed.

The American public expresses more confidence and trust in the US military than in any civil or private-sector institution. Such esteem for the military is notable given that the public also believes recent US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were failures. Confidence may emerge from the military’s professionalism rather than delivery of battlefield results and may also reflect positive sentiments based on social expectations and “cheap” patriotism. The public’s willingness to fund, join, or grant autonomy to the military is more circumscribed than high trust would suggest; the public may be “confident” but is willing to overrule generals and admirals when values are in conflict. Confidence may increasingly reflect political support: both a growing affinity between the military and the Republican Party and a tendency (again, stronger for Republicans) to express more confidence when the president is of one’s own party. Disturbingly, trends in public opinion as well as recent behavior of politicians and retired military leaders all suggest growing politicization, with possible ramifications for weakening civilian control, ultimately causing a loss of the public’s trust.

After nearly two decades of war, public confidence in the US military remains high, even though our wars remain inconclusive. There is no shortage of public discourse on the perceived failures of civilians overseeing these wars. Yet this chapter asks: Is the uniformed military increasingly resistant to civilian oversight? Are members of the military making it tougher for political leaders to do their jobs? High public confidence in the military is neither the best measure of the health of civil-military relations nor the same thing as the military’s being trustworthy. This chapter argues that military leaders will best serve the public by focusing on ways they can exhibit appropriate behavior in their dealings with the public and civilian leaders. The trust required for healthy civil-military relations and effective civilian oversight is a two-way street, and those in uniform must recognize their responsibility for introspection, self-policing, and holding themselves to account. This chapter assesses what it might take for the armed forces to “screw up” their relationship with the American people, discussing five potential pitfalls that members of the profession of arms must avoid in order to be worthy of the public’s trust.

This chapter discusses Eisenhower's televised efforts to “calm” the American public after the Sputnik launch. He gave a series of nationally televised speeches on science and national security, assuring the public that there was no crisis, that no rash action or legislative program was needed. General Andrew Goodpaster noted that this effort—dubbed as Operation Confidence—aims to restore the public confidence in the U.S. national security, and prevent “crash programs that would be unnecessary, that would be very wasteful and misdirected.” By setting the proper tone and invoking the right words, he hoped to banish the Sputnik issue from the news.

The chapter uses contemporary policing problems and challenges to evaluate how well training prepares recruits, auxiliaries, detectives, and managers for the police role. It reviews patterns of police corruption, misconduct and complaints against officers and considers whether, and how well, training helps police forces counter such problems. It also notes instances of positive responses to failures of service delivery. The discussion moves on to examine the challenge that diversity poses for the police, both at a cultural level and in respect of the specific experience of female officers, ethnic minority officers, and officers with alternative sexual orientations. The lessons of sickness, stress and injury on duty are considered in relation to how effectively training and supervision helps counter these. A discussion of public confidence and trust is used to address the concept of police legitimacy and to place it in relation to the acquisition of professional competence.

This chapter situates Neighbourhood Policing in a social and policing context, arguing that in order to understand how and why it gained traction at the particular moment when it did, it is necessary to establish how it relates to a longer and deeper history of policing ideas. It proposes that, as a particular iteration of the community policing philosophy, Neighbourhood Policing reflects a defining tension in the police mission as to whether the principal focus should be upon crime management, or a broader notion of community support and order maintenance. This analysis develops a detailed discussion of the community policing tradition and how it has ebbed and flowed over time in terms of its popularity, outlining a theoretical framework for thinking about how and why community policing interventions impact upon public perceptions and experiences of crime, disorder, and security.

Public bureaucracies are central institutions in the delivery of public services. There has been, however, some tendency to consider all bureaucracies as fundamentally the same. This chapter rejects that assumption and examines a number of different ways of comparing public bureaucracies, including rational choice theory, administrative culture, organization theory, and institutionalism. These approaches have supplied both qualitative and quantitative data for the comparison of administrative systems, and demonstrate the diversity of public administration around the world. These approaches serve as the background to the study of administrative traditions as another powerful approach to understanding how public bureaucracies function.

Mass incarceration is at near pandemic proportions and yet there is evidence of poor public confidence in how sentencing is handled by the criminal justice system with many finding the courts too lenient. This chapter considers this problem about public confidence and sentencing from a distinctive angle: if public confidence in sentencing is so poor, then why not include the public more in sentencing decision-making? Restorative justice is a welcome first step about how the public can participate effectively with high satisfaction and lower reoffending at less cost. The chapter argues that restorative justice should be expanded to include more punitive outcomes, including hard treatment, in what the author calls “punitive restoration.” More punitive options for restorative justice may increase its applicability and positive outcomes like improved public confidence while embedding it further into the criminal justice system.

This chapter considers the prospects for the new police service's core mission to reduce crime, disorder, and anti-social behaviour, and the extent to which public confidence will support them. It analyses statistics on crime and anti-social behaviour. It describes past incidents of disorder and riots and how these were prevented by the police. This chapter also focuses on the public support for the police and the role of neighbourhood watches in reducing crime.

This chapter, written by Edgar Jardine, is primarily an assessment of the performance of the PSNI from 2001-02 to 2001-12, including national comparisons. Beginning with a reference to the Independent Commission recommendations in regard to planning and setting objectives for policing, it then sets out the trends across a wide range of recorded crimes, including violence against the person, domestic burglary, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour. Describing the detection rates by the PSNI, these are benchmarked against other jurisdictions, followed by a section on public confidence in the police service. The chapter ends with a section interpreting PSNI performance and the indicators adopted by the Policing Board, and finally it notes alternative approaches to performance management.