Satisfaction with Police Services — Methodology and Sources
What this measures
The percentage of Victorian respondents who said they were 'generally satisfied' with police services in the National Survey of Community Satisfaction with Policing (NSCSP).
Higher is better. The NSCSP is a long-running phone-based survey administered by ANZPAA (the Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency).
Why this isn't response time
The brief originally proposed Police Priority 1 response time for this Section-6 slot. We removed that metric because Victoria Police does not formally measure or publish Priority 1 response time as a time series — the Victorian Auditor-General reported (2015) that this measure simply does not exist outside of one-off VAGO calculations. The Vic Police Output Performance Measures tabled with each annual report list community-satisfaction metrics, family violence incident counts, road fatalities, etc., but no response-time series. Rather than carry hand-keyed approximations of a metric that isn't published, this slot now carries a verifiable national series.
How values are derived
From the Productivity Commission's annual Report on Government Services — Table 6A.7 in the 2026 release, Table 6A.3 in the 2020 release. ROGS publishes the NSCSP figures for "General satisfaction → Total satisfied" by state. The stitched series:
| FY | Vic % satisfied | ROGS release |
|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | 77.8% | 2020 |
| 2015-16 | 74.8% | 2020 |
| 2016-17 | 70.8% | 2020 |
| 2017-18 | 78.9% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2018-19 | 78.2% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2019-20 | 78.5% | 2026 |
| 2020-21 | 79.5% | 2026 |
| 2021-22 | 76.7% | 2026 |
| 2022-23 | 73.1% | 2026 |
Overlapping years (2017-18, 2018-19) match exactly across the two releases.
Why the series stops at 2022-23
In 2023-24 the NSCSP changed its data-collection method from phone-only (CATI) to a phone + online combination. ROGS explicitly cautions that the post-change results are not directly comparable with previous years. Vic's reported "Total satisfied" dropped from 73.1% in 2022-23 to 55.5% in 2023-24, a step too large to be plausibly attributable to a real change in attitudes — most of the change is the methodology shift. Rather than splice a methodologically broken series, the line truncates at 2022-23.
Reading the line
- Stable around 78% from 2017-18 to 2020-21 (the long-running pre-COVID baseline).
- A clear dip in 2016-17 to 70.8%, recovering the following year.
- Decline from 79.5% in 2020-21 to 73.1% in 2022-23 — a 6-point fall over two years.
Caveats
- This is a subjective-attitude measure, not an objective performance measure. Satisfaction shifts with news cycles and salience effects, not only with policing operations.
- Survey 95% CI is typically ±2-3 percentage points for the Vic sample, so small year-over-year movements are not statistically significant on their own.
Sources
- Productivity Commission — Report on Government Services 2026, Section 6 Police services
- ROGS 2026 police dataset CSV
- ROGS 2020 archive dataset CSV
- VAGO — Emergency Service Response Times (2015) (one-off study; confirms Vic Police does not publish a Priority 1 response time time-series)