They asked some hard questions and now Regina police are getting some hard answers from a survey.

The results are in from one of the biggest and most expensive surveys ever conducted by the Regina Police Service are in and it reads like a road map of where police should refocus their efforts. Many people identified graffitti and vandalism as a big problem in the city while others talked about problems with drug dealing and drug use.

One of the first areas of concern was the level of trust in police. A concerning statistic found that one in five people surveyed had low confidence in what officers do.  The people who had contact with police had even lower levels of trust.

Police Chief Troy Hagen wasn’t terribly surprised by this because police are usually needed to resolve conflicts and which are not pleasant circumstances. He pointed out the positive results.

“When we look at the other questions in the survey about being approachable and friendly we rank higher than the national and provincial averages,” Hagen said.

Superintendent Lance Dudar said trust is extremely important in the relationship between the public and the police.

"I''m not going to say that they are going to be more combative but they may be more resistant they may be a little more reluctant if they don't trust us," Dudar said, noting that there are different forms of trust.

These numbers are even higher in a separate survey of 49 aboriginal people showing that  73.5 per cent of that particular group, have low trust and confidence in police.

FSIN Chief Morley Watson explained that those feelings of distrust run very deep in his community's history dating back to the residential school system.

"It's not just with law enforcement it's with different forms of authority because we always feel that the Indian agents and the Northwest Mounted Police should not have allowed our children to be taken in the first place," Watson said.

So how should the police begin to fix these problems?

People who responded to the survey outlined the top areas they think the police should improve. Most people asked for more police visibility, followed closely by a suggestion to improve interactions with youth. Others asked for more work on minor offenses and community policing.

Chief Hagen said the police are more than ready to do the work to look closely at a total of five recommendations seriously to see if they can improve.

This is just the beginning of a bigger project to gather and gage community perceptions of police and collect them in a database. Some of these questions had never been asked before but they will be asked again in two years.
 
Edited by News Talk Radio’s Adriana Christianson