The Police Foundation is building qualitative research into many of our projects so we can provide policing and policymakers with more insights into public sentiment, as well as the opinions that practitioners hold, both inside and outside policing.

The work we have done to support the Police Leadership Commission since November 2025 has involved many focus groups with officers at different ranks, along with a new survey of sergeants and inspectors, and that final report is forthcoming.

More recently we have undertaken surveys and focus groups to inform the work we are doing on police technology and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in policing. More details of our work in this area will be released over the summer.

Linked to this, and in support of today’s major speech by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner in Stratford, we spoke to Londoners about their attitudes to policing and crime in the capital and explored their views on technology and how the police might modernise.

The speech by Sir Mark Rowley this morning drew on some of the findings of that research, which we are publishing today. Across three focus groups and a representative survey of Londoners last week, we explored key issues and tried to unpack what the implications are for policing as it embraces new crime-fighting technologies at the same time as seeking to maintain public trust.

The survey of over a thousand Londoners by Public First (summary here) sets the scene.

• Londoners are generally more conservative on crime than you might expect. Almost two-thirds (63%) of Londoners agree Britain is not tough enough on criminals (35% strongly). This is heavily influenced by age – but even half (49%) of young people aged 18-24 feel this way.  As a measure of general hawkishness on crime, a large majority (62%) think the death penalty is appropriate in some cases, against less than a third (29%) who say it can never be justified. And on police powers, 43% think the police do not have enough power and 32% think they have too much.
• More than 1 in 7 Londoners (15%) say they have been the victim of a crime in the past year. This is concentrated among the young (21% of under-35s vs just 5% of over-65s). And stated willingness to report crime is strong – 46% say they would report every crime they were a victim of, and only around 6% say there are circumstances in which they generally would not.  This makes the performance of the police directly relevant to a large minority of Londoners who have been crime victims or have friends or family who have been.
• Trust in the police in London has been improving, and as an institution, our survey found many more Londoners trust the Met than trust local or national government. But differences by ethnicity are smaller now than the political divide: White Londoners trust the Met just slightly more than ethnic minority Londoners (50% vs 46%), and those born outside the UK are marginally more trusting than average (52%). But Green voters are very distrustful, and a large section of Reform voters feel the same. Trust in the Met is highest among those intending to vote Labour (62% trust) or Conservative (60%), and lowest among Green voters (31% trust vs 40% distrust) and Reform voters are narrowly net-positive but divided (41% vs 35%). The two party leaders who have been campaigning recently on how policing is deficient (Polanski on protest powers and Farage on ‘two-tier’) seem to have been echoing the negative opinions of their own base.

• There is broad support for the police modernising. Around 8 in 10 Londoners either somewhat or strongly support ‘adopting new forms of technology as part of police work’, or ‘making use of information [police] already hold to identify offenders’ or ‘connecting information from across different police systems about offenders’. Confidence in the police’s current capability is generally low – 34% think criminals are better than the police at using technology, compared with 19% who think the police are ahead and 31% who think the two are evenly matched. For example, there is only a very small minority who oppose greater use of technology in policing.
• There is not a general distrust of technology companies – twice as many people say they trust technology firms than say they distrust them, and far more people distrust government. But when it comes to technology people have a sense that policing is behind the curve, and if people think that it is (even if that is not always the case), that further erodes their confidence in policing.  Confidence, after all, speaks to competency and skills, and whether the police can get the job done. We found similar attitudes reflected among the 36 individuals who attended our focus groups earlier this month.

This is where today’s speech fits in – if the public are going to recover their confidence in policing and ultimately if the Commissioner is going to drive an improvement in the Met’s service to Londoners, new technology is going to be the keystone. Since arriving in the role over three years ago, the Commissioner has pushed for more innovation and now he is making the case publicly for greater investment in new technologies to keep people safe.

Participants in our focus groups wanted the police to succeed. Regardless of age or ethnicity, Londoners were sympathetic to the police’s predicament – too few people trying to meet too many demands – and so most supported greater use of technology if it made the police officer’s jobs easier.  However, there was a lack of understanding of what different tools are and what they can do, and an appetite for more information on how technology is being used by police.

ANPR, CCTV and drones were more accepted because they were better understood or more normalised in daily experience. LFR and AI raised more searching questions, and were generally not well understood. The public felt less clear about the use cases and less comfortable about the rules. As such they were more concerned about their reach, their impact on privacy and about possible future misuse or data breaches.

Asked about the police using AI ‘generally’, Londoners are net-negative: 40% oppose it and only 33% support it. This hesitation about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) did not follow through into opposition when use cases were described. Once specific, concrete uses are asked about – such as using AI to predict where resources will be needed, identifying repeat offenders or linking crimes – there was 60% support or more for almost every scenario.

In our focus groups, live facial recognition triggered the most debate. Support often depended on context, transparency, signage, safeguards and clarity about what data is stored, by whom, and for how long. AI was treated as inevitable and potentially useful, especially for search, pattern recognition and investigative support. However, participants consistently rejected the idea of AI replacing human judgement. They wanted officers in charge of key decisions and this sentiment is also clear in the Public First polling.

The main ask from the public when it came to technology was that the police “show us clearly how it works, prove it is useful, explain the safeguards, and keep a human accountable”. One conclusion is that whether the public believe police use of technology is legitimate will depend not only on effectiveness, but on explainability.

Fortunately for the Met, this means that the Commissioner’s ambitious technology agenda is one that has broad support among Londoners, and today’s speech is part of that vital explain and educate role. However, in a polarised political environment – which was the theme of this year’s Cumberland Lodge conference – leadership of the police in London must also recognise that trust in them and in their actions splits more by political allegiance now than it does by income, age or ethnicity.

This has lots of implications for how the police communicate and what their messaging says about new tactics and tools. The police will need to be more transparent as these technologies evolve and roll out, and put extra effort into explaining how new technologies work, and why they are important to keeping us safe. If the Met do that then they can depend on Londoners to be enthusiastic about those efforts, not simply to tolerate them.

Our research does present another challenge for the Met. Across ages and backgrounds, the focus group participants were not content with policing in London and could all point to failings. Many had personal or family experiences of crime, or of being let down in some way, or of just being generally dissatisfied with how the Met responded to an issue in their neighbourhood. Across all three groups, the dominant view was that the Met is under-resourced, over-stretched and inconsistent in its response, especially for everyday crime such as shoplifting, phone theft and local disorder, which many participants felt the police had all but given up on.

But these groups in London reflected the same sentiment we have also heard in recent months in Peterborough, Liverpool and Cardiff too. The public are not hostile to the police, and nor are they angry at them. They are more despondent than critical. They know the police are doing their best with insufficient resources. The public recognises that the whole justice system is under-funded and has been for years, and this makes the police’s job even harder.

And as our survey shows, today’s attitudes to offending have hardened and this reflects rising levels of anxiety about crime and disorder, and so it is perhaps no surprise that the public want the police to be equipped with the means to respond.  As with many policy areas, the public are not content with how things are, and they want to see a step change. The wider implication for policy-makers is also the simplest: the public, overall, support police deploying drones and live facial recognition because they want the police to start winning again. If tools like AI can be shown to help the police do that, they will have broad public support.

There is one final takeaway: in their preferred scenario, investing in technology is not an alternative to what the public want even more – policing and a justice system that is properly funded, focused on catching criminals, and reliable for victims. The Commissioner is right to argue that yes, sometimes those goals can be better achieved with new technology rather than extra uniforms, but he would probably rather not have to choose. And framing it as a choice between better technology or more bobbies might be fiscal realism today, but that won’t satisfy the public for long. They are right to want both.