The politics of the police have been debated for decades. For years the police have been accused of favouring certain groups over others – sometimes with justification and other times not.

The traditional assumption has been that conservatives or voters on the Right are reliable supporters of the police, and that left-wing, especially urban voters on the Left, were more critical, and might even have been treated differently by the police. Then there is the complex history of the police with respect to ethnic minority communities, or of those from poorer backgrounds. The equal treatment challenge has been around a long time, even without the current ‘two-tier’ label.

After the austerity years when the Coalition government fell out with policing in a big way, the last few years have seen a gradual attempt by Conservative politicians to reclaim their reputation as the ‘law and order’ party, even if their policy agenda remains quite under-developed.  It was notable that Kemi Badenoch chose to attend last month’s Police Federation conference – the first Conservative Leader of the Opposition to do so since David Cameron. Her speech was a direct attempt to repair relations and was unashamedly pro police. This is broadly a return to the traditional position adopted by most of their middle-class voters.

But today’s political environment is surfacing a very unusual dynamic where criticism of the police is not coming from where you would expect.  Rather than the Left adopting a critical position, you are hearing frequent criticism of the police – and not just policing leadership but frontline officers – from the populist Right.

It is not a sudden turnaround. Reform UK voters represent an anti-establishment and sometimes libertarian perspective that would logically make them more sceptical of the police, given their opposition to an over-mighty State in an age of surveillance and in the aftermath of the pandemic. But certain events have probably intensified these views among Reform UK voters and policing so far has not understood the implications.

Last week’s announcement by the Home Secretary of a review into the Henry Nowak murder is a welcome sign that Ministers recognise how important this case was, and how much reputational damage it has done to policing. As we said at the time, many key facts were never released and the force’s response was unsteady and far too slow, and this did not help the media narrative that was then stoked by others.

It will be essential for Alex Chalk KC to get to the truth of the murder and how the family were treated, and then to lay out the facts in full. Transparency here is essential and Hampshire Constabulary will need to fully cooperate, even if mistakes were made and disciplinary action could still follow. That is the very least the Nowak family deserve.

At the same time we also cannot and should not ignore that there were those who sought to weaponise that incident and use it to advance broader political agendas. This was underway before the criminal trial even concluded and it continued afterwards, with Nowak’s name frequently being invoked in order to assert that there was a broad trend of unequal treatment that was institutionalised in policing and unequal treatment was therefore premeditated.

We have seen similar tactics by some national politicians in response to body-camera footage of incidents in other places – most brazenly in this social media post in the summer criticising West Midlands police officers and describing it as more “harrowing evidence of two-tier policing against white people”. This was an example of how such rage-bait content (recorded from the comfort of the air-conditioned SUV) is now seen as legitimate output from national politicians – including one aspiring to be the next Home Secretary.

These were incidents used by Reform UK politicians to make a broader point about the police as an institution, but it is not the messenger as much as the message that shows how far we have now come. We will likely see more of these attempts to highlight (and distort) individual cases and use them as proof of a wider malaise affecting the police, because it is echoing the views of a section of the public and regrettably, it is angry content like this that is generating views and clicks.

The fact that the critics are now more likely to be Reform UK politicians rather than left wing activists is not an evolution that most police leaders have yet appreciated let alone adapted to. And whether we approve of the tone or the tactics, such critics appear to be channelling a level of discomfort and distrust with modern policing that we should not dismiss as fringe. As another Reform UK politician has asserted, “The police have lost the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of many”.

Popularity of the ‘two-tier’ label has taken off since 2024, and we know from other surveys in the summer that a perception of unfair treatment is now focused on the Right. The survey undertaken by ZenCity for the 44th Annual Cumberland Lodge policing conference laid that out.

And perceptions matter because they eventually affect levels of trust and confidence. In YouGov’s latest tracker, the trust in police question gives some remarkable results. Overall, when asked, how much, if at all, do you trust the police, 5,483 adults surveyed on 2 October 2026 said a great deal (8%) or a fair amount (47%). Barely a majority. A combined total of 42% said not very much or not at all. These are not good numbers in themselves and other surveys have shown an ongoing decline since around 2016 but especially post 2020. If the NHS had these numbers it would be a national scandal.

But for this latest survey, Reform UK voters were the most negative by far. The largest proportion of these respondents said not very much (40%) to whether they trusted the police, and 20% said not at all. Just under a third (32%) said they trusted them a fair amount. Compare that to the 6% of Conservative voters or 7% of Labour voters who said they did not trust the police at all. Overall Reform UK voters were far more negative than any other group of voters, with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters all about the same.

Why do a fifth of Reform UK voters not trust the police at all? That is a high level of disaffection from a party that is scoring either second or third place in England on present polling. We have seen a similar trend emerge in polling of Londoners around police use of new technology like drones, facial recognition and AI.

Although not highlighted by the Commissioner in his speech in June, this warrants further enquiry.

In research we undertook, the two voter groups most likely to be sceptical of these developments and to withhold their consent to new police technology are not younger voters, or older voters, or voters from poorer backgrounds. Londoners most likely to be opposed to police using these new technologies are Green voters and Reform UK voters. In almost equal measure, these two voter groups are distrusting of the police – but presumably for different reasons.

The anti-establishment and protest history of the Green movement is perhaps no surprise in these numbers. But they are now matched by equal distrust among Reform UK voters, who are demographically very different to Green voters and overlap on hardly any other policy issue.

And the difference today is that we are living in a much more volatile political climate and national politicians are operating in a five (or six) party system not a three party one. So these two groups might be on opposite ends of the spectrum, but together they now make up between a quarter or even a third of all voters – so hardly a fringe view.

There is a similar dynamic on the question of whether voters think police are doing a good job. YouGov’s monthly tracker puts the total at 53% of adults saying good job on 5 October 2026 – lower than before 2020 but marginally up since 2023 – and 38% saying bad job. But if you sort for Leave voters the gap narrows (50% good to 44% bad) and for social class (C2, D, E), for these voters the gap disappears – evenly split now at 47% (when before the pandemic, 63-72% of these voters said good job). The voters most likely to support Reform UK are the Leave voters and those from lower social classes who already think the police are doing a bad job in much larger numbers than professionals or Remain voters. We would be worried that policing has not even noticed this divergence.

We are in the midst of an unusual political realignment. Today’s police leaders need to recognise that the politics of today, and the fragmented media environment, is reshaping public opinion and it is having an impact on how the public feel about the police as an institution. But this is also reflecting voter dissatisfaction that, despite the drop off of support for Reform UK in recent months, is still the view of a sizeable minority of voters.

Attendees at our Cumberland Lodge conference in June argued that the response to that accusation of two-tier treatment requires a serious engagement with the issues and that perceptions ultimately matter because they impact behaviour and the willingness of the public to support officers, so policing needs to take the charge seriously rather than gloss over it.

Some voters have gone from seeing the police as honest and impartial referees in a country with discord and division playing out among many social groups, to them being seen as players on the pitch. This conclusion makes the police fair game for unchecked criticism and it risks a general politicisation of policing – which some politicians are now actively espousing – which will ultimately erode trust even further. Even if this view is not widespread, it is a very serious reputational challenge among a growing minority and it needs debating.

All of this makes it even more essential that the police work hard to defend their neutrality, assert their commitment to policing without fear or favour, and to correct quickly when they have made a mistake. It was encouraging to see the recommendations of the Police Leadership Commission in July where they made a similar point, not just as a basis of good leadership but for the confidence we need the public to have in our model of policing by consent.

Good police leaders have recognised the challenge. They now need to find new ways to actively engage with all parts of society – including using new tools and communication methods to reach certain disaffected voter groups who feel strongly that policing isn’t working for them. And these groups aren’t the same as they used to be – which means they aren’t sitting on police advisory groups or attending community meetings.

Talking to these voters and understanding them is now a strategic communications priority for policing, in a world where political tribes are shifting, incidents can be distorted, and public trust can no longer be taken for granted.