Public confidence in the police as a factor contributing to individual preventive work with citizens

Ensuring of the public confidence in the police as a principle of police work was first introduced in the Russian legislation in 2011. On the pages of scientific literature the concept of confidence is seen from different angles. In this article, the author proposes to give a social and political meaning to this concept, in other words, to consider the citizens' confidence in the police as the attitude of the whole society towards its particular social group called the police. This confidence is based on the all-over need to determine the most appropriate forms of cooperation between society and police in order to achieve the objectives of public interest. In the course of the study, the author has found that the main source of shaping the positions of law-abiding citizens towards the police in the Russian Federation is mass media. Monitoring of publications about police officers in media has revealed a mainly negative assessment of police activities. The consequence of this approach is that Russian citizens totally distrust the police. The police officer has a unified form: a wrongful conduct of one police officer results in the common opinion on all persons of this profession. Therefore, in order to distinguish between dishonest and respectable police officers we should take in accusing information about a particular offender considering the views of his / her colleagues on the fact of non-legal actions. This approach is similar to the principle of adversarial sides of the trial. To put this principle into practice, the author offers changing the Code of Professional Ethics of Russian journalists and the order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation "On improvement of activities of subdivisions of information and public relations, the press relations departments of the police of the Russian Federation and police troops of Russia" by adding the following sentence: "The necessary measures upon the timely response to the information published in certain mass media about misconduct of a police officer shall be the publication of the opinion of the offender's colleagues in the same media on this fact".

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