Survey Results

Complaining that Baltimore's police chief is out of touch, the police officers union released a survey yesterday concluding that morale is poor and calling for the chief to be fired if conditions don't improve.Fraternal Order of Police leaders said officers feel they get no support from city leaders. And nearly half of those surveyed said they have considered leaving the department because of Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier's policies, the leaders said."It's going to be harder and harder to motivate people to go out there and do their jobs if they feel nobody is supporting them.

WASHINGTON -- Although a majority of Americans say that they closely follow the daily turns of the O. J. Simpson trial, the number of people across the nation watching television news shows or reading newspapers continues to decline, according to a new poll to be released today by a media monitoring group.The Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press estimated -- based on its survey results -- that about 40 million people, or about 24 percent of the adult public, are watching "all or most" of the daily, live Simpson coverage and that about 59 percent "watched, read or heard" about the trial coverage.

Do you like your job? Do you like your bosses? If so, why? These are the key questions behind this special publication by The Baltimore Sun. During these unsettled economic times, learning what makes workers happy is crucial information for companies. Budgets may be lean, but firms can take affordable steps to improve their employees' morale - sometimes it can be as simple as learning the workers' names or sharing information. That's not only good for employees; a company's bottom line also can benefit from happier workers.

Bill Clinton's economic program isn't playing any better on Main Street than the president's $200 haircut, according to the latest consumer confidence poll.Virtually all the postelection surge in optimism about the new administration's ability to turn the economy around quickly has evaporated, the Conference Board survey for May showed.Confidence in May plunged to the lowest level since October, the private research group said yesterday. And job worries are intensifying despite few reports of major new layoffs and Labor Department data suggesting that job growth picked up modestly in the past six months.

Most Baltimore-area residents just don't get it when it comes to fixing blame for polluting Chesapeake Bay, says a public opinion survey released today.A majority of 2,500 area residents surveyed said industrial dumping, commercial ships and farm runoff contribute "a great deal" to the bay's woes, according to the poll, which was conducted last spring by the University of Baltimore Schaefer Center for Public Policy in cooperation with the Baltimore Regional Council of Governments.Less than half of those questioned saw their own sewage, trash dumping and boating as big problems, and two out of three contended that what they do around their homes does very little to dirty the bay. "While each individual may not have a large impact on pollution, experts generally agree that the sum of individual activities is a bigger source of bay pollution than industrial and municipal discharges," says the survey.

Seventy-one percent of school system employees responding say that overall morale at their work site is good, while 85 percent of respondents indicate confidence in Superintendent Sydney L. Cousin, according to the 2006-2007 job satisfaction survey conducted by the Howard County Education Association. HCEA President Ann DeLacy shared the survey results with county school board members during Thursday's meeting. Of 6,300 employees the union represents, 3,089 - about 200 fewer than last year - completed the 28-question survey, which was distributed in December to teachers, guidance counselors, support professionals, instructional assistants, nurses, social workers and cafeteria workers.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has famously declared that she wants her next job title to be "grandmother. " But a Harris Poll indicates that Mrs. Clinton is just about the only politician with a job approval rating above sea level. And a second survey suggests that American moms - remember the role of the soccer mom in 1996? - would rather vote for her for president than Barack Obama or any of the Republican candidates. It might be time to change the date on those "Hillary 2008" buttons.

Maryland's state employee pension system, which had such poor investment returns three years ago that it finished last in a national ranking, now falls among the top half of its peers. The state's 46th-percentile ranking in a Wilshire Associates survey comes after a period of reform in which the system's top officials were replaced and investment procedures were overhauled. The survey results, announced yesterday, compare the system against other large public pension funds for the fiscal year that ended June 30. The pension system's fortunes changed significantly as it posted a $3.5 billion gain for the fiscal year - a 16.16 percent rate of return on investments.

A survey released today by Anne Arundel Community College shows county residents are almost evenly split betweenPresident George Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton, but are united in their view that the economy is the nation's most serious concern.According to the telephone survey of 577 residents conducted between Oct. 5 and 8, 40.2 percent of those likely to vote said they favored Mr. Clinton, compared with 36.1 percent who favored Mr. Bush.The difference is not statistically significant, since it falls within the survey's five-point margin of error.

CHICAGO -- In what has been called the most comprehensive survey of the nation's faith since a seminal study in 1968, Baylor University sociologists reported yesterday that Americans aren't losing religion, but they're defining their spiritual lives differently. As a result, researchers say, millions of pious people have slipped below the radar of most religious surveys, misleading scholars to sound the secular alarm too soon. "People might not have a denomination, but they have a congregation," said one of the survey's authors, Kevin Dougherty, citing studies that contend the number of nonreligious Americans has doubled in the past decade.