Building trust through community engagement with Police Scotland
The challenge
Police Scotland is the national police force for all of Scotland. It’s a huge, sprawling organisation with nearly 25,000 staff, including over 17,000 full-time police officers, and 13 regional divisions.
Police Scotland understands that to police with openness and transparency, they need to regularly engage with the public, whether it's a statutory requirement or not. That’s why every year they run a ‘Your Police’ survey to gather feedback and “understand the views and priorities of Scotland’s diverse communities.”
Before 2019, Police Scotland relied on old, outdated survey tools to get feedback from the citizens of Scotland. Then, they procured Citizen Space and revolutionised their public engagement.
Our approach
Using Citizen Space, Police Scotland create interactive, accessible feedback surveys that use geospatial data and GIS mapping to identify problem areas.
They then make sure they feed back after all their public engagement activities using Citizen Space’s integrated feedback mechanisms like We Asked, You Said, We Did. “It’s about policing by consent, but also proving that we’re doing that,” says Eve Georgieva, who worked in the same team as Davina. “Feeding back is really, really important. That’s how we establish our trust with people and show we’re transparent in what we’re doing.”
As well as their annual ‘Your Police’ survey, they also use the platform to gather feedback on issues like Body Worn Videos and policing at football matches.
The results
Police forces aren’t in charge of creating new laws or policies - only their enforcement. They don’t have a statutory duty to consult the public. But an important part of Police Scotland’s continuous improvement of their service and relationship with the public is a robust community engagement programme.
It was important to embed good working practices across the board, so Davina and co built a robust training package to those in Police Scotland who wished to run community engagement activities online. Recommendations included ensuring all engagements are built with accessibility in mind. Based on public feedback, Police Scotland now publish their activities in plain English as well as BSL versions.
The result has been a series of engagements with huge response rates. Since procuring Citizen Space they’ve seen a 500% increase in response rates. Since 2019, the ‘Your Police’ survey has seen a huge increase, receiving 16,666 responses and over 50,00 free text answers to the 2024-2025 survey. From this they created appropriate policing responses, developed new partnerships with youth and community groups and piloted new approaches to police community engagement and advocation.
With continued engagement via Citizen Space throughout the year, Police Scotland has become the gold standard in policing.
Everybody who’s used Citizen Space within Police Scotland loves it.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.