Item 2 is our inquiry into community policing. This is the first of the committee's scheduled oral evidence sessions for the inquiry. There will be a suspension of 15 minutes at 2.45 pm to allow the videoconference link with Professor Wesley Skogan in Chicago to be set up. I welcome the first two witnesses, who are Deputy Chief Constable Jim Barker-McCardle of the National Policing Improvement Agency, and Rachel Tuffin, research officer at the Home Office. I thank you for joining us to give evidence. The committee will move straight to questions because we have boned up on the various activities that you have carried out.
Can the panel give us some indication of the main features of the neighbourhood policing programme?
Most certainly, and thank you, convener, for the invitation to appear before you. In briefly answering the question, I will reflect on some of the history of the neighbourhood policing programme because it is important to acknowledge that the programme is, and was originally, built on a strong evidence base. The programme reflected the early work that was done in the national reassurance policing programme, and a growing realisation that moving from what I would call the looser, woollier concept of community policing in England and Wales towards a more determined and specific model of neighbourhood policing built on international research and knowledge would require more than a loose framework of implementation across England and Wales.
Could you direct your comments to Mr Martin's specific question?
Certainly. Forgive me. I thought that you were asking for the key features of the programme. I can give you more detail on the contents of the programme and the products that it has delivered. I am sorry, convener. I was not seeking to stray from the question; I was trying to stress that how the programme is managed is one of the key features.
I think that we got that from your answer. Perhaps you could highlight one or two ways in which it differs from other approaches.
First and foremost, the programme relies heavily on the evidence drawn from Chicago and from Martin Innes's research—I know that he is speaking to the committee later. It also draws on experience from 43 police forces in England and Wales. The senior responsible officer is a chief constable, so it has a specific chief constable lead nationally, but within the programme we deliver an array of products. Examples include guidance on community engagement, specific guidance to basic command unit commanders on effective performance frameworks, and the provision of 200 or 300 seminars and workshops to support the development of neighbourhood policing.
You mentioned community engagement. Surely part of officer training should be community engagement training. How is your programme any different from that? What is innovative about community engagement?
I agree that there is nothing new in the concept of community engagement. Indeed, one would say that it is one of the founding principles of policing across the country. However, we recognised that, in the array of different community policing models that existed, there was little research that we were relying on to identify the most effective forms of engagement. Furthermore, we had not necessarily been equipping neighbourhood police officers with the skills and understanding to run community engagement events effectively.
Why was the neighbourhood policing programme formed in the first place? Was it the result of a political direction or local events?
There were a number of drivers—a combination of six or seven produced a significant head of steam. I can briefly run through them chronologically.
So, despite significant resources being invested in communities at the time, there was no reduction in the antisocial behaviour statistics. Is that a fair summary of the outcome?
It is. Undoubtedly, there was strong support for visible local policing, particularly on foot. However, police forces began to realise that it was not driving down crime. Confusion was also growing on the meaning of the word "community".
At that point, I am sure that you would have undertaken an appraisal of the various models that could be adopted. Were models under consideration other than the Chicago experience?
We drew particularly on Chicago in what has become the partners and communities together engagement technique, which is one of a number of techniques that we have adopted. We drew on the University of Surrey and Surrey Police research on signal crimes and on research in which my colleague was directly involved with others in academia on the evaluation of the national reassurance policing programme. In many ways, that programme was the forerunner of the neighbourhood policing programme proper. I think that much of the early learning on that developed from the national reassurance policing programme.
Was there no alternative to Chicago? Why do we always end up there? Does it sound good? Does it make good headlines if you are considering an alternative that is based in Chicago? Surely other experiences and other parts of the world should be considered.
Yes. I do not want to lead you to think that the neighbourhood policing programme that has been developed over three years is a rigid model that is contained in a box out of which we will not stray. The programme was established to take account of any overseas learning or research that comes along, wherever it comes from—Canada, America or Australia, for example. My colleague and others in the National Policing Improvement Agency maintain strong links with colleagues in other parts of the world precisely for that reason. If there is a good idea or a tried and tested piece of practice, we will look at the appropriateness of adopting it in this country. That said, we did not start out with a specific architecture of neighbourhood policing and follow it dogmatically. We are in a learning process in which good-practice discovery is made en route.
You referred earlier to the definition of terms. How has the term "neighbourhood" been interpreted and defined by different forces in the context of the neighbourhood policing programme?
Neighbourhood policing is now more than just high-visibility policing on bike or on foot, although visibility contributes. We now talk about an approach that seeks to increase contact between police and public in a particular geographical area—the neighbourhood as opposed to the looser concept of the community—to focus on making local police work more responsive to public needs; to develop the notion of collective security and shared interests within a neighbourhood and between different public services; and to tackle local problems strongly in partnership so as to increase confidence and reduce not only the perception but the incidence of antisocial behaviour and crime. That approach seeks to build on the already fairly established national intelligence model.
Academically, in terms of a manual being provided to your officers, that sounds plausible. However, what specific example can you give us from one of those forces of what you have just described being translated into front-line activities? What innovation has been shown in terms of contact with communities that did not take place before?
The innovation is the more sustained and determined approach to different forms of community engagement and a public commitment to respond to what is identified, linked with the extended geographical coverage. In many cases, depending on where one was in the country, the geographical extent of community policing was, arguably, patchy in places. There is now a much stronger geographical coverage, with all neighbourhoods having access to named police officers or named teams, depending on the size of the neighbourhood, and officers, along with other partner agencies and local authorities, committed to tackling local problems in a way that makes sense to the local community.
The neighbourhood policing programme is presented as a national programme, but what scope is there for local flexibility to take account of the differences between, for example, urban and rural areas, affluent and deprived areas and high and low-profile crime environments? Are any features of the neighbourhood policing programme non-negotiable?
I will answer your first question first. Yes, there is considerable scope for flexibility. The national programme does not seek—nor has it ever endeavoured—to set out a formula that governs, for example, the distribution of police officers or police community support officers. That decision rests entirely with the local force and will take account of demographics, crime trends, deprivation, travel times, sparsity, density and everything else.
You have mentioned police community support officers. How important are those officers to the programme?
They are regarded as vital. It would have been difficult to get the neighbourhood policing programme running nationally—and to get forces to deliver against a commitment to have a named officer or team in every area—if additional resources had not been provided. One of the great stretches and strains in former models of community policing was the fact that officers were torn between vandalism, at one end of the spectrum, and terrorism, at the other. It was often coverage at the community or neighbourhood end that suffered.
What lessons have been learned from the process of implementing the neighbourhood policing programme at both a force level and a local level? Is the programme now part of mainstream policing in England and Wales?
Before we came here today, it was interesting for us to reflect on what we would do differently if we started the neighbourhood policing programme again. We concluded that there were four things. First, we would pursue clear abstraction policies in all forces much earlier in the programme. Secondly, we would develop the performance framework and circulate it to forces earlier. To some extent, we are using the benefit of hindsight, because there was a degree of learning on the way.
Good afternoon, colleagues. Rachel Tuffin might want to respond to my question. Mr Barker-McCardle said that the approach relies heavily on the evidence, so I turn to that. Neighbourhood policing teams are expected to deliver increased police visibility, greater community involvement in the identification of local priorities, and a commitment to collaborative problem solving. What evidence is there that progress has been made in relation to those three indicators?
You might be familiar with the evidence from the national reassurance policing programme, on which, as Mr Barker-McCardle said, much of the current programme is based. That is perhaps the strongest and most robust evidence that we have on many policing issues. It suggests that we can significantly increase all the things that you mentioned, in a statistical sense, through a process that is close to the current approach of neighbourhood policing. It is much more difficult to demonstrate that with the national roll-out because all forces are proceeding at the same time.
That is right—and so says your written submission. You talked about there being a mixed picture so far. Let us talk about two of the indicators. First, on the public priority indicator, have there been cases where it has been difficult to get the public working with the police? I notice from the Chicago experience that it was less difficult to get people in more socially deprived areas—where we would expect it to be more difficult—involved than it was to involve those in more affluent areas. Is that experience echoed in England and Wales?
The key issue with community engagement is that the methods have to be tailored to the people whom you are trying to reach. I know that that is an obvious point, but it is critical. The evidence from the national reassurance policing programme suggests that the wider the variety of types of engagement that are used, the better, including the sorts of things that my colleague will have mentioned, such as street briefing, door knocking, web-based approaches and surveys. It depends on whom you are trying to reach and for what purpose. Is it a consultation or are you feeding back to the community the results of something that you have done? Do you want the community to participate in problem-solving activity, which is more than a consultation exercise? Different tactics will be appropriate and that will depend on what you are trying to do.
Are people across the range more amenable to becoming involved if the right approach is taken to drawing them in?
It is partly about the right approach, but it is also very important that they see something happening as a result of the engagement. That mistake has been made in the past: a lot of consultation has been done about what matters to the public, but the perception is that there has been insufficient action. If you do not go back to the community and tell people what you have done to address the issues that they have raised, or to explain why it is not possible to tackle a particular issue at this time, any subsequent engagement will be limited because people will not see the purpose of getting involved.
Where it works well, does community policing complement neighbourhood policing? Do community policing and community involvement provide intelligence for the police so that they can combat particular manifestations of antisocial behaviour?
The short answer is, categorically, yes.
I am glad about that. Will you elucidate?
The more confident communities are in our ability to be accessible and to respond, the more likely it is that there will be a virtuous circle of continued engagement and greater trust. Communities will trust us more to deal sensitively with what we are told. However, as Rachel Tuffin said, we have to go back to the supplier of the information and tell him or her that we have actually done something about it. We cannot always assume that what we have done will be visible to the person who contacted us in the first place.
So, a continuous flow of appropriate and relevant information is central to the process.
Yes.
What evidence is there that the neighbourhood policing programme has had a positive impact on what I imagine is another indicator, which is the perception of safety.
I am sorry. The perception of what?
Of safety.
Of safety. I am sorry.
That is all right. It is my accent. Forgive me.
That question leads me to another issue that I feel is quite important, which is perceptions versus reality. It is sometimes contended that public perceptions of antisocial behaviour, fear of crime, and feelings of lack of safety are somehow separate from the reality, but evidence from the national reassurance policing programme suggests that that is not the case. People's perceptions track their experiences in their communities. As a result, if the problems that matter to people—crime and antisocial behaviour—can be tackled, that will impact on perceptions of safety, of the crime rate and of police effectiveness.
I understand your point about the link between perceptions and reality, but is the degree of people's feelings important? People might perceive that there is a lack of safety in their areas, but their perception might be exaggerated. That is not to say that there is not a lack of safety. Tackling areas that are unsafe could have an effect on people's perceptions.
Yes. It is also often thought that police visibility can be reassuring: the public feel safer when the police are around. However, some evidence suggests that we have to be more specific and say that the public feel safer if they feel that the presence of the police reduces crime and antisocial behaviour. It always comes back to a real impact. It is not about a general feeling of safety produced by a police uniform; it is about what people think the police can do to tackle problems.
So it comes down to the effectiveness of action by the police working with the community, within a framework that is formal yet flexible.
Indeed.
Neighbourhood policing was the subject of detailed analysis in the recent Flanagan review. The National Policing Improvement Agency's submission to the committee states that
The most significant recommendation in Sir Ronnie Flanagan's report that will directly affect the construction of phase 2 of the neighbourhood policing programme—the second three years—relates to what I think he referred to as the principles of neighbourhood management. There is a good and growing track record of local problem solving under community safety partnerships, and under crime and disorder reduction partnerships with parish councils and local authorities.
At least one of my colleagues will come on to the partnership approach that you mentioned, so I will let them discuss that further. My next question is perhaps for Rachel Tuffin. There has in the past been criticism about community policing not being part of core policing and about performance management indicators not fully recognising it. Are such concerns justified?
Local interpretation has meant that there has perhaps been too much focus on a limited number of crime types. That was not the intention when the indicators were brought in. There has been a change in how the performance management framework is set up to allow variation at local level. In addition to focusing on serious crime, there will be surveys that ask about the local crime and antisocial behaviour problems that matter to people. A method of measurement has been introduced that allows local variation according to what matters in particular neighbourhoods. That change might suggest acknowledgement that the performance focus was too restrictive.
I take you back to your earlier comments on community engagement. I note your suggestion that we must ask with whom to engage and why such engagement is desirable. There must be feedback to communities. Are some mechanisms more successful than others? How would you account for the differences? Is it a question of whether we are dealing with a more deprived community, or with an urban or a rural community, for example?
I reiterate a point that I made earlier: it is true that some techniques are more effective than others, depending on what one wants to do. There is evidence—from Chicago and from the reassurance policing programme, for example—to suggest that traditional methods of engagement can be problematic in some circumstances. If the community is not reached out to—in other words, if the police do not go to meetings that members of the community have arranged, do not knock on their doors and do not hold street briefings—and the expectation is instead that the community will always approach the police, problems might arise with attendance at traditional meetings. A strong theme about reaching out to communities has emerged from the work that has been done.
It was about the need for guidance to be issued in order to get the best out of community engagement.
There is consistent evidence to suggest that the more empowered the community is, the more skills it has, the more involved it is and the more ownership it takes, then the more successful community engagement can be.
Paul Martin wants to come in on that point.
I will wait until Margaret Smith has finished her questions.
I am interested in whether such considerations have formed part of the work that you have done to make information available. You suggested that guidance has been made available to police officers on how to improve what they do. Has guidance also been made available to community organisations, parish councils and elected representatives, for example, on how they can get the best out of neighbourhood policing?
Such information is available in a plethora of places. There are various websites, as well as a number of extremely helpful interactive tools. We can certainly provide information about some of those resources, if that would be helpful.
It might be useful to receive information on a smattering rather than a plethora of those resources.
Just carry on.
Mr Barker-McCardle touched on abstraction, which is one of the great bugbears for community police officers and local representatives, as it always seems to be the reason why a local senior officer says that he cannot deliver what he has promised or what he wants on the ground. Has genuine improvement occurred in abstraction levels or has the improvement come about simply because there are community support officers? What extra resources have been required to get to the point at which people expect to see improvements? You mentioned the indicator that people are generally happier with policing levels. What resources have come in to make that happen?
I agree that abstraction has been the bugbear in local policing efforts and that it is easily used as an excuse. I will come to numbers in a minute, because I agree that the issue is in part about numbers, but it is also about where neighbourhood policing is in the pecking order, for want of a better phrase. Is it the part of the local policing that is raided before any other part to mobilise resources for a problem somewhere else, or is it the part that has particular importance, related to public confidence and visibility? If colleagues need to mobilise, it is just possible that other parts of the policing structure should be visited first when a duty planner looks at the duty sheet.
Technically, officers should attend local community forums. That has always been the case—it is nothing new. I have been an elected representative since 1993, and there has always been a directive from senior officers that officers should attend community forums and make communities aware of who they are. What enforcement is there? How do you ensure that the vision is delivered? I am sure that if I interrogated websites throughout the United Kingdom, particularly in the areas for which you are responsible, I would not be able to find out who the local police officer is for every single area. If the vision is not delivered, where do we go?
If the commitment was not delivered, public confidence in the entire concept would collapse quickly and we would be heavily criticised country-wide in the media. Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary, as part of its baseline assessment of all forces in England and Wales, includes neighbourhood policing as an in-depth area for inspection. It has specific grading criteria that draw heavily on the documentation, guidance and advice that underpin the programme, which set out what all the evidence tells us are some of the best ways of doing neighbourhood policing. Among the things that the inspectorate will examine are geographical coverage, abstraction policy and whether the officer's experience of abstraction is consistent with what the line manager is saying. Only a minority of forces are currently graded as being excellent on neighbourhood policing; the bulk are satisfactory. Those gradings are public.
Although it all sounds good from a presentational perspective—community engagement, glossy documents and the website—people are saying, "I'm sorry, but there's no engagement with my local police force because they don't engage with me; I'm not aware of facilities to let me interrogate a website to clarify the situation," or, "I don't even have access to a website so how do I find out that information?" If police forces are not willing to engage and we want to take the carrot-and-stick approach, we do not have the stick to ensure engagement. Although you can present community engagement well, it might not work in reality.
The reality of 43 inspection reports, if they were presented here, would indicate the extent and depth to which the inspection process goes. The process results in publication of information on areas for improvement, with which chief constables and forces have to comply.
My question is about a similar point, but comes from a different direction. You have said a great deal about information that is available to the public, including contact details. How is feedback—not so much on issues on the ground, but on the system—from the public, the PCSOs and rank-and-file police officers fed back to the NPIA so that it can learn from it? There might be a specific issue in one part of England and a similar issue might occur in another part of England: how will the information get to somebody further up the chain who can say, "Well, the same issue exists here and there. How can we fix it?"
There are several points to address. First, the programme has six field officers. Six in 43 forces might not sound like a lot in some respects, but they spend their entire time in the field engaging with the chief officer leads in each force and with the programme teams, and talking, walking and sitting with community support officers and police officers who do the job. You can therefore see the direct connection between the national programme team, the people who are running the programmes in forces, the command teams and the officers on the front line. It would be somewhat reckless if the NPIA were to proceed on the basis that everything was necessarily as a manager or senior manager would report it.
Many police officers, PCSOs and others have access to the members area of the neighbourhood policing programme website. Members from different force areas send in case-study examples of problems and explain how they dealt with them. That information is picked up by others and used where appropriate, although it is obviously tailored to the local context.
If a member of the public had a particular issue about which they had been in contact with a PCSO fairly regularly, who would they contact to raise the matter further up the command chain?
I do not know whether we have had any experience of the public contacting the national programme team directly, but I can certainly find out. Before I joined the NPIA, my experience was that members of the public who thought that they were getting nowhere would generally seek to write to the commander in charge of the local policing area or to engage via their parish council, local authority, local ward councillor or member of Parliament.
Politicians get letters and e-mails regularly about a host of issues. If there was a clear way for members of the public to contact you, that would help MPs down south, parish councillors and so on.
You have talked about the concepts of neighbourhoods and communities and you mentioned consultation of parish councils and local authorities. What are your definitions of the neighbourhood and the community with which you are trying to engage? Those are important concepts, which we have to get clear in our minds.
We work on the basis that someone could belong to a number of communities while residing in a particular neighbourhood. Someone might be part of the commuter community, the small business community in the local high street and a visible minority ethnic community. The fact that people can belong to a number of communities at the same time is where the confusion arose for many of us. "Community" started to feel like a slightly woolly concept when it was applied to a model of policing. In the national programme, a neighbourhood is a defined geographical area.
I thank Ms Tuffin and Mr Barker-McCardle for taking the time and trouble to give evidence. We have had a useful session.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome Professor Martin Innes, who is director of the universities police science institute at Cardiff University, and Professor Adam Crawford, who is director of the centre for criminal justice studies at the University of Leeds. Thank you for coming, gentlemen.
How do the witnesses define community policing? What are its key features and why is it regarded as a necessary feature of contemporary policing strategies?
As we heard, there are different approaches to community policing and there is perhaps some debate about where community policing begins and neighbourhood policing ends. If we consider community policing generically, an important distinction, which is not semantic but conceptual, can be made between community police and community policing, which is to do with the extent to which community policing is understood in organisational and institutional terms as being about the relations between the police as an organisation and local communities and key partner agencies. In that context, the debate is about responsiveness, relations and community engagement with police officers and the police force as an institution.
Earlier this afternoon we heard a great deal about neighbourhood and community policing. According to current research, what is the public's and rank-and-file police officers' general perception of PCSOs' role in helping with neighbourhood and community policing?
The role of PCSOs is interesting. We have heard about how important they have been in delivering a certain institutional infrastructure, through neighbourhood policing teams. One of the most important aspects of their role is the fact that they have limited powers. That has enabled police managers to reduce abstraction pressures and has meant that PCSOs can be—and, by and large, have been—dedicated to the patrol function. PCSOs have contributed significantly to visible patrols. That raises another set of questions about the purpose of patrolling. We entitled our research report "Patrolling with a Purpose" because essentially the act of patrolling must be about community engagement that taps local knowledge and capacity, especially in crime prevention. Where PCSOs work particularly well, they do so because of their capacity to engage with the public sector and with people living in residential areas, and to solve particular local problems. That is much harder for police officers, who are pulled hither and thither by other pressures.
Around the world there are different models of community policing. Is there robust evidence to indicate which of those models appears to be the most effective? Would any of them be appropriate in a UK context? If so, why?
That is a big and difficult question. We have already heard about some of the models. There is an evidence base for the benefits of having multidisciplinary teams that are dedicated and tied to specific geographical areas. Such teams can do many of the jobs that community policing seeks to do. Often the problem with community and neighbourhood policing is that it has grand ideals but is difficult to implement. It is important to have teams that are dedicated to particular areas and can resist wider pressures, as well as pressures relating to turnover, status within the organisation and movement of jobs. In the English context, how we keep people dedicated is a particular issue in relation to community support officers.
Later this afternoon, we will hear about community policing in Chicago. However, Australia's culture is probably more akin to that of the UK than is the culture of Chicago and the US as a whole. Has research been done into the methods that are used in larger cities in Australia?
I am not abreast of the most up-to-date research in relation to Australia, although I have been there relatively recently. In Australia, there is a lot of interest in what is going on in England, and there is a movement of ideas from the British context to the Australian context. However, I am not in a position to say what the latest developments in Australia are.
I have a question for Professor Innes. How important are issues of police culture, management, leadership and resources in developing any community policing model?
Over the past 10 years in the United Kingdom, we have learned that, in order to make different types of community policing work, we need a cohesive and coherent structure and system to underpin the delivery mechanisms on the ground. One of the most important things to come out of the research in England and Wales is the fact that, without leadership, management and attempts to re-engineer the culture of the organisation, success and delivery will not follow.
I want to pursue that point. When we were down in the Borders examining the situation in relatively small towns and relatively isolated communities, with quite a number of miles between them, I was struck—as were other committee members, I am sure—by the relative ease with which there could be one management structure for everybody who was working in a certain town. The question whether they could all be located in the same office is not so easy, however. Has there been research into how to deal with such issues in big cities, which have many times the population of small towns and where there is a need to break the area up into many little units? Do you have experience of that or any observations to make? Is there any evidence that that can be done on a large, urban scale?
Yes. Although the previous witnesses have spoken about a neighbourhood policing model, different organisations in England and Wales are adopting different approaches. The London safer neighbourhoods model has effectively been developed through a massive increase in resources and what is known as the one, two, three system: every ward has one sergeant, two police constables and three police community support officers assigned to it. The ward becomes the unit of analysis, delivery and measurement.
My geography is a little rusty, but whereas Wolverhampton, for example, is a reasonably small place—compared with Birmingham, which we would have to describe as a large place—if I drift over the border, I can go to Shrewsbury, which is a very small place. It is easy to imagine how collective management might be possible in Shrewsbury, but it would be interesting to see how that would work in Wolverhampton, which would probably need to be chopped into three or four patches for the purposes of sensible management. Is there any evidence that larger places have been divided up effectively for the purposes not only of policing but of local authority services such as housing and social work, so that everyone works as a team in an area that is big enough to have adjoining teams?
I have seen that happen in two locations. The London Borough of Sutton is developing some pretty good joined-up working by aligning local authority administrative areas and policing arrangements. That has been facilitated by appointing an individual who works half time as a superintendent in the Metropolitan Police and half time as the community safety lead for the safer Sutton partnership. In addition, the staff have been co-located. A similar process is taking place in Cardiff—I cannot say whether it has been successful—where the city has been divided up into six neighbourhoods that are common to all service deliverers.
Is the partnership working in Sutton far enough down the line for us to be able to derive lessons from what it has achieved?
I think so. I think that Sutton provides a good model of partnership working. If the committee is interested in pursuing the issue, it would be worth talking to the people in Lancashire, who are probably the leaders in that field.
We may well explore those options.
To what extent does the panel think that current United Kingdom police performance management systems recognise and reward community policing activities?
Traditionally, it has been difficult to measure aspects of work that do not easily conform to performance measurement. That is true not only of community policing but more generically. For example, elements of crime prevention can be difficult to measure by their very nature because, in a sense, they involve measuring a non-event. The emphasis on performance measurement has often gone against the role, status and organisational recognition of community policing within the police force. To go back to an answer that was given in response to your question to the previous panel, the movement towards reassurance policing and the neighbourhood policing agenda came about in part because of a recognition that the measuring involved in performance management was having perverse effects by, in a sense, skewing certain elements of the capacity to deliver community policing.
Professor Donnelly makes a similar point about performance measurement in his written submission. Given that some communities are not served by their full complement of community police officers, could performance be measured on the basis of the effect on a community when it does not have a community police officer?
Sorry, will you rephrase the question?
As we speak, some communities do not have their full complement of community police officers because, for example, the force has not been able to provide cover for an officer's maternity leave. Is there a method of clarifying whether increases in crime have resulted from the lack of a community police officer supporting an area?
One would need to look at the extent to which the evidence supports that. However, it is difficult to work out a previous baseline and to determine whether there is a causal relationship between the increase in crime and the lack of a particular dedicated officer.
I will rephrase the point again. If a community is served by one community police officer—in some cases, the complement is in fact zero—could there be some way of measuring any increase in antisocial activities in the community when the community is not served by its community police officer? Could that not be a method of measuring how effective the community police officer is?
That certainly would be some kind of measurement.
So there is an available method of measuring the effectiveness of community police officers. I am not saying that it is the most accurate, but it is a possible method of clarifying the impact.
Different factors are involved, and it partly goes back to the purpose of the community police officer. We have talked about wider relations and engagement with local communities, and reference has been made to issues of visibility, public confidence and perceptions of security, which are all slightly different measures from the one that you identify. It depends on the principal aims of the role and how you wish to measure their achievement.
Are our police forces throughout Scotland and the UK creative in the way in which community policing approaches rural communities, as opposed to urban communities? Do they use different methods in those two different environments?
I do not know enough about where police forces in England and Wales are up to at the moment with the implementation of neighbourhood policing teams, especially in rural areas. Going back to an earlier question, in a sense, rural areas present more challenges, particularly in relation to issues to do with teams and visibility. Although there are management and partnership challenges in urban areas, there are challenges of visibility, accessibility and familiarity in rural areas.
It is not all about visibility, though; at the same time, it is about being able to react to crimes or prevent them.
Certainly.
Good afternoon. Let me take you back to the question of community engagement. Ms Tuffin said that there is a degree of flexibility in the way in which community engagement could be undertaken and that one model does not fit all circumstances. I think that that is absolutely the case. In your experience, what mechanisms of community engagement by the police appear to be more successful, and why are they more successful? What challenges do local communities face in trying to engage with community policing initiatives, and how can those challenges be addressed?
It is important to an understanding of community engagement and how it has been progressed, and how it should be progressed further, to recognise that it needs to be embedded as a proactive rather than a reactive element of policing. Typically, when the police have sought to undertake engagement, they have relied on people coming to them with their problems, rather than placing the onus on themselves as police officers to go out and research and understand the problems that pertain to all the communities.
I endorse what Professor Innes said. Community policing is challenging and time consuming, which is why either it is not done at all or it is not done rigorously. Of course, when it is not done rigorously, the sections in communities that are best able to articulate their voices are the ones that tend to get heard. That reinforces the importance of the proactive challenge that Professor Innes was outlining.
You have said that engagement with community policing is patchy. Is there a tendency for that patchiness to be split along social demographic lines? One of the striking things about Chicago was the willingness of the African-American communities and the communities in the most deprived areas to be proactive in the process. If the priorities are to come from the people, it is important that the people should be engaged. Is the picture in England and Wales similar, or is Chicago atypical?
Although the Chicago evidence is important, we should not overstate its relevance to the UK context. The political culture is very different. What struck me about the results from Chicago was that the African-American communities were starting to see improvements in their social and economic status anyway. The process was part of a broader movement.
You mentioned different political environments. Will you elaborate on that point?
The challenges of engaging with communities that are traditionally socially excluded and which have a history of structural deprivation and high crime rates are very different from the challenges of engaging in the more affluent areas of Surrey, for example. What came out of our research was an understanding that the desire for engagement among communities can be more textured—it can be situational, in effect. There is a bit of an assumption in policing that communities should want to engage with the police all the time. That is not the case. People in the more affluent areas in particular are quite content for a more distant form of engagement. However, when a major crime or serious incident takes place in their community, they want the capacity to make contact with the authorities, engage with them and solve problems jointly. That is different from the situation in some of the more deprived, high crime areas, where there is a need for on-going engagement. That is an important point, which has not yet been fully appreciated in England and Wales.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. In your view, which features of community policing initiatives are the most effective and successful in reducing crime and ASB and increasing public perceptions of safety?
I return to the earlier point about the way in which community police officers and other officers who have responsibilities proactively engage with diverse members of local communities in problem solving. We researched the first year of implementation of PCSOs in two cities in the north of England, and it is clear that they worked best where they went out of their way to talk to local businesses and residents about the nature of local problems and engaged in specific crime prevention work. We were told that, where they were seen as mobile scarecrows—in other words, where they just walked around somewhat aimlessly—what they did had much less impact.
You talked about a team in a particular area. I would guess that PCSOs work most effectively not only where they engage with the diversity of the community rather than being mobile scarecrows, but where they complement mainstream constables. Is there any evidence that they do not work where there is tension due to a lack of complementarity between PCSOs and mainstream constables?
The integration of the PCSO role within the police services has always been one of the biggest organisational challenges, and it remains a major challenge. However—
What is your impression of the integration, or the lack of it?
Over time, deliberate effort has been required to confront and engage with the cultural issues. There are questions about the role and powers of PCSOs and when they can and should call on police officers to support their work. PCSOs are in large part dependent on the assistance of police officers, particularly in relation to detention powers.
I take it from your answer that there is continuing, albeit creative, tension between PCSOs and mainstream constables.
Undoubtedly there is. That is still an issue. There are questions about the limitations of the PCSO role. When we did research in the early years, we were concerned about mission creep and the slippage of powers. We thought that PCSOs' powers would increase and that their role would move from being a dedicated patrol officer who did the things that we talked about earlier to being an officer who filled in service gaps that appeared in the police organisation.
Will you define mission creep for me, please? Do you mean going native or—
No, I mean the police organisation moving away from the original purpose of PCSOs being patrol and community engagement to saying, "Here's an officer who can be used to fill certain functions that we might need to fill."
In other words, being a substitute, albeit not a fully qualified one, instead of being complementary to fully qualified constables.
That was always the tension—it is within the role and it needs to be managed. In a sense, the arrival of neighbourhood policing teams led to the original mission and idea of PCSOs being protected. It enabled police managers to ensure that PCSOs were not pulled into other service functions.
Do you gentlemen continue to support the idea of PCSOs? Did you ever support it?
One important issue for police forces in England and Wales is that PCSOs give them the ability to deliver something that was difficult to deliver for a long time—visible patrols. If you go to parts of England and Wales, you cannot but realise that a significant change has taken place. Forces are now able to deliver a key aspect of what members of the public always say they want, which is visible policing. A major shift and development has taken place in that regard.
Do you share your colleague's concerns, Professor Innes?
Yes, but for different reasons. On the basis of my field research, I know of individuals who perform the PCSO role superbly and add value to policing as it is delivered on the ground. Typically, those individuals tend to be from different backgrounds and have different life experiences from those individuals who join the police.
Other than measuring crime and ASB reduction and the public's perception of increased safety, what else could be measured to evaluate the effectiveness of community policing?
Output measures could be put in place on, for example, the number of contacts that people have had within the community. I know that some organisations are introducing output measures based on things such as community intelligence submissions.
We would not want to bury the patient.
I largely endorse what has been said. A variety of output-based measurements could be used, as long as they are seen as means of encouraging and facilitating wider outcome measurements. That is ultimately where success lies.
I am obliged.
We will lastly ask about partnership working. You have dealt with police community support officers down south and other agencies, but perhaps the issue could be examined a little further.
Given the time, I will be brief. From your evidence, it would be safe to judge that you believe that partnership working between the police and other agencies is important. What are the key ingredients in a successful partnership?
The simple answer is mutual trust, which is premised in large part on some understanding of other organisations' responsibilities and the limitations of what they can do. Often, one difficulty with working across organisational boundaries is a lack of understanding of others' capacities and limitations. In particular, agencies often think that the police can do everything, and they are therefore happy to leave things to the police. Learning about how other organisations work and developing interorganisational trust relationships are important parts of interagency and multi-agency partnership working.
In addition, partnership working needs agreement that the different bodies are working to a common set of priorities and from a shared evidence base.
I do not know whether you heard the evidence from Jim Barker-McCardle, but he suggested that shared accommodation could encourage better partnership working. Are you aware of that happening in any locations in England or Wales?
Yes, in Sutton and Lancashire.
Thank you.
Before dismissing the witnesses, the committee may be minded to seek further written information about the Lancashire and Sutton projects to see whether there is anything to be learned from them.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
The next part of this afternoon's business is a link-up with Professor Wesley Skogan in Chicago. Good afternoon, Professor Skogan, or in your case—
Good morning.
Good morning.
There are three underlying principles. The trick is how they get turned into programmes on the ground, which varies considerably from city to city, because in my country the police are highly decentralised and locally controlled. However, the same three principles underlie most community policing around the country.
We accept that.
First, the decision to do that was rooted in the best possible reason—politics. The mayor perceived that he had several problems on his hands, one of which was that in the early 1990s, crime rates were going through the ceiling. We had terrible waves of homicides and street drug wars, and demands were made that something be done. The mayor could point to the fact that he was doing something about his police department as an affirmative response to the problem.
That is interesting. I invite Stuart McMillan to examine the strategy in a little more detail.
Professor Skogan, you said that incorporating the public was key to the programme. What were the other key elements of the Chicago alternative policing strategy?
Chicago chose to hold public meetings every month in every one of its small police beats—there are 280 beats, so they are not very big. The police would meet the public to exchange information and discuss problems. Other cities do not do that. Some cities have advisory committees at higher levels, which are more manageable. Other cities conduct opinion surveys or hold police academies. People come from all over the world to see the meetings that Chicago holds, because they are so unusual, so please do not think that having such meetings is the usual response.
To summarise, there are three key elements: public meetings, the exchange of information and the accountability sessions. Is that correct?
The accountability sessions have evolved, and it is my description, not the police department's. People meet the police, hear what they have done and complain or give them approval and say, "That's terrific, we've seen big progress on the problem." That little accountability feedback loop has emerged as an important part of Chicago's programme. That is what happens when a body engages the public regularly. As a consequence, the public are critical and rewarding, when they see their concerns being responded to.
What changes did the programme require in the Chicago Police Department and how were they achieved?
One of the biggest changes in the police department was the move to a turf orientation. Previously, Chicago, like many cities, had a computerised dispatching system. A call would come in and the computer would pick up the next available car, which would be dispatched. Cars would drive around here, there and everywhere in the course of an evening, often ending up pretty far from where they started. There was no connection between calls, so two or three teams of officers might respond to problems in a single block in the course of a night. In other words, it was a nice, modern, efficient and professional system.
It sounds a bit like the KISS—keep it simple, stupid—method that one hears about in managerial speak from time to time.
I think that some parts of it are transferable, but there is a governance problem with making other parts of it work. I will talk about that, as it is an important issue. There is a big difference between our system and your system. You could do the turf orientation, which essentially involves making local unit commanders responsible and having officers stay on the beat. That is a sensible solution that brings many benefits, and it does not increase the need for manpower much. People have to work with the dispatching rules and manage things. Could you do civic engagement? You could develop various ways for the public to interface with the police, talk to them, discuss priorities and bring problems to the table. That could be done in many different ways.
From your evaluation of CAPS, how successful has it been in tackling neighbourhood problems, reducing crime and increasing public perceptions of safety?
Over the years, we have conducted various evaluations of the impact of CAPS. It is the big programme and it has many goals, so we have had to take many different approaches to gauge its outcomes. I will go through some of the approaches and say what we found.
Professor, that was more than comprehensive. I have no other questions.
Good morning, professor. It is interesting that CAPS has successfully involved the different ethnic groups in the city. What particular challenges did communities face in their involvement with CAPS? You suggested that, over time, changes had been made to the way in which community engagement was done. Could you give us some more information on that?
Certainly. I will speak to the three great communities, each of which presents its own challenges.
You have discussed some of the cultural issues that needed to be overcome—issues relating to language and the cultural awareness of officers and others. Obviously, that involved developing a recruitment strategy that enabled you to deal with diversity issues. Your comments on those issues and on the programme as a whole suggest that this was a resource-intensive operation and that significant costs were involved. Is that a fair assessment? Has the programme survived changes over time in the political environment in Chicago?
The cost of the programme and who pays for it is an interesting issue. Chicago's programme is not much more expensive than others. We should recall that the beat officers' role is simply to respond to calls, except when they take off to go to beat meetings and to engage in other projects. About 70 per cent of officers' time is spent answering calls, so they are doing the work that needs to be done. Some overtime expenses are involved, because officers who are off shift—members of the beat team who are not working at the time of beat meetings—get paid overtime to attend beat meetings. Although meetings are held at 6.30 or 7 in the evening, the police want officers from the day shift and the midnight shift to attend to represent the problems that arise at other times of the day. Conducting the meetings involves some minor expenses. However, providing some paper so that agendas can be handed out at beat meetings is a small price to pay, given that Chicago Police Department's budget is $1.1 billion.
In our communities we face the issue of abstraction. Often community police officers are taken away from areas because they must appear in court or help to police events such as marches and football matches. Are beat officers protected as much as possible from abstraction?
Their job is to answer 911 calls, so if they are abstracted someone else must be put in place to do that. The programme's designers ensured that beat team officers would spend about 70 per cent of their time answering calls. It is difficult to abstract them, because then someone else must deal with the calls. Abstraction has turned out not to be much of a problem.
The major abstractions of officers in Scotland are to police football matches and other large sporting events and marches and their aftermath. Who funds the policing of baseball or football grounds in Chicago?
The handling by police officers of traffic and general security—I emphasise "general", because police officers do not take tickets or guard the doors—is always an overtime assignment, for which the officers get extra pay. The cost is always met by the consumer of the product. Our football team has a contract with city government and pays for the officer hours, supervisory hours and administrative overheads for assignments such as providing general security on the football ground, directing and controlling traffic or providing an emergency van with communication equipment—all that is part of the contract.
Bill Butler will ask about the broader challenges of community policing.
Concern is often expressed that community policing is not part of core policing and police performance management indicators do not fully acknowledge the breadth of community policing activity. Is such concern justified? If so, how should it be addressed?
Your analysis is 100 per cent accurate. There are many movements and innovations in policing, but they do not always add up or correspond to one another. I have witnessed significant clashes between community policing and what are most broadly called management accountability processes—systems such as New York City's compstat or your extensive system of commissions, bureaus, auditors and improvers, which oversee the operation of local policing, sometimes even down to the basic command area. Such things do not always work in tandem. For years I have been kvetching—as we say in Chicago—about the need to find ways of developing and including in management information systems more information that is relevant to the effective application of community policing.
What evidence is there that some mechanisms are more successful than others in terms of community engagement and what accounts for the differences?
Let me start with that second question, because it is very interesting. American cities are quite divided in terms of the kinds of autonomous citizen action that they can sponsor and be responsible for. A city at the opposite end of the spectrum to Chicago would be Fort Worth, Texas. Fort Worth is a very interesting town of about 600,000 people. It is a substantial place but it is very poor. The city and the police department are the active sponsors of a large and aggressive community patrol scheme. Private citizens' cars are scheduled, and what I would call giant refrigerator magnets are attached to the sides of the cars to say that they are part of a neighbourhood patrol. The magnets are slapped on the sides of the cars when they go out. The cars have a radio so that citizens can call in to the local police. The citizens wear distinctive orange jackets that say "Citizens on Patrol" on the back. That is all part of an official public programme, but it is at one end of the spectrum and not a lot of places do that kind of thing.
I take it that you prefer Chicago's approach. Is that because, at its extreme, there is a danger in Fort Worth's approach, for example, of vigilante groups emerging?
That is a possibility. I have not seen or heard of anything that I would describe as vigilante action in Fort Worth. In fact, the big goal there is to identify street drug-market activity and inform police units about it. Any sensible citizen in America does not intervene; our criminals are armed to the teeth and are very dangerous people, so it is best left to the professionals. The extent to which the bad guys carry guns in our country means that vigilante action will always be fairly restrained. Our citizen patrols are about calling in the professionals; they are not about engaging in vigilante activity. Once the ordinary police get involved, they are bound by the constitution—they have been trained in the laws of the state of Illinois—as they are under any circumstance.
You have given us comprehensive answers and have probably given us more or less all the information that we need. Are there any other questions?
I echo the convener's remarks, Professor Skogan. Your answers have been informative and detailed.
That is a very good question. I have not discussed one very important aspect of the programme, which is that the beat meetings and the public participation in marches, rallies and Saturday morning clean-up programmes do not happen accidentally. Another aspect of the programme is that there is a fairly large office staffed by a team of civilians, who are all community organisers and are experienced, professional people. When the office is fully staffed, there are about 85 of them. They are carried on the police department's budget, because that protects the office from other politicians, but they have a civilian director, who is a well-known former civil rights leader in Chicago. They are called the community mobilisation team and they go out, march, walk the streets and give out brochures. They also go to other meetings and encourage people to attend beat meetings. When there is going to be a march on a Saturday morning, they ensure that people turn out for the march and that marchers have posters to hold up. They support the clean-up programmes and see to it that the paint and brushes arrive and that somebody is out there to help get people mobilised on a Saturday morning. The staff of civilian organisers who push along public participation play an important part in the programme. Chicago is a big city; we have 3 million people so it takes a substantial amount of staff work to reach out, mobilise and push people forward. Financially, that part of the programme is not that expensive, especially when you are talking about a budget of $1.1 billion. Having an implementation office has been an important part of making the public side of the programme work as effectively as it has.
Professor Skogan, you said earlier that something like 15 per cent of the reduction in crime could be attributed to CAPS and that the other 85 per cent could be attributed elsewhere. To what can that 85 per cent reduction be attributed?
The huge decline in crime that has taken place since about 1991 is one of the great mysteries of the United States at the end of the 20th century. There was a sharp drop during the 1990s; the decline has now levelled off in Chicago, although it is still dropping a bit throughout the 2000s.
Thank you, professor. You also said that the drive behind the programme came from the mayor's office. What would the reaction be if there was either a change of mayor or a political change between the neighbourhoods and the police?
That is hard to say. We have had a mayor Daley in office since 1953 and our current Daley shows no signs of leaving, so I have no experience of mayoral transition. However, I know that mayoral transition has created big problems in other cities. In Seattle, when a new mayor came in with a new set of priorities, he got rid of his old chief and went in another direction. I could name other cities too.
If there are no further questions, I thank you for giving evidence. I heard a lecture that you gave some months ago in Edinburgh. I was sufficiently impressed to think that the committee would derive a lot of benefit from having evidence from you—that has proved to be the case. We could learn quite a lot from Chicago, although perhaps not on the issue of political and civic nepotism. The figures on crime are most impressive. We are very much obliged to you for giving your time. No doubt we shall hear from you again.
Thank you for your thoughtful questions.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
Our final visitors are Dr Daniel Donnelly, of the Scottish centre for police studies, who gave evidence at the earlier stage of our policing inquiry, and Alistair Henry, who is a lecturer in criminology at the University of Edinburgh.
How would you define community policing and what are its key features? Why is community policing viewed as a necessary feature of contemporary policing strategies?
Traditionally—that is, since the 1980s—community policing has been looked at as an opportunity for members of the public to participate in policing, influence policing in their area and gain a feeling that their problems are being listened to and their questions are being answered by the local police. In recent years, the definition of community policing has become broader. In the past few decades, the iconic patrol officer would have been viewed as the centre of community policing. Recently, however, there have been more players in the wide world of community policing. The private sector plays a part, as do closed-circuit television systems, local authorities and their agencies, community wardens and the voluntary sector. More important, within the police organisation, there are many, many more individuals—civilian police staff, detective officers, analysts and a wide array of others in the background—who play an important role in modern-day community policing.
I would reiterate much of what Dr Donnelly has said, but I also make the point that the definitions of community policing have been notoriously vague and varied—that may be one reason for the committee's interest in the issue. Often, the definitions have been aspirational and have simply reflected how people, including police officers, would like policing to be. As a result, community policing has sometimes been thought of as being more about rhetoric and how we want policing to be rather than about actual practice. The powerful thing about the definitions of community policing that have been proposed by scholars such as Wesley Skogan and David Bayley—whom I will mention in a moment—is that they try to connect community policing with its operational aspects. Rather than just rhetoric, community policing must be about doing something quite specific.
HMIC's 2004 report "Local Connections—Policing with the Community" highlighted confusion and ambiguity about the term "community policing", given the varying styles, approaches, labels and designations of community officers throughout Scotland. The report stated:
The point that HMIC made about community policing could be expanded to cover levels of service in other areas of policing throughout Scotland.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Dr Donnelly, you articulated what you regard as an urban/rural split in respect of abstraction. In effect, the employment of community police officers in an urban setting is suspended because of various things such as parades, concerts and football matches. I guess that the corollary is that that does not happen in rural areas. Is there a way round the problem?
I would not say that it does not happen in rural areas. They have their own—
It happens less often, or to a lesser extent.
That is probably more accurate, yes.
Okay. How can we get round the problem?
There are a number of ways, the first of which is to make additional police resources available to the police organisation. That is difficult, because the police are always engaged in additional work and specialisms. Never a year goes by without another workload falling at the feet of the police. History shows that, as we bring in new recruits, officers dissipate somewhere else, but the provision of additional resources is certainly one way of tackling the problem.
Work can be done by another member of the police family, then.
Yes—by an extension to the police family.
I understand what you say.
Sometimes it is more than that; sometimes the model is dictated by the local authority and the local chief constable. Edinburgh has particular models for tackling community crime, and the police in Glasgow set up a model of neighbourhood teams, which is fully supported by the local authority. Because they can put large numbers of community support officers on the streets, they can afford to have a different type of community policing.
My research was focused more on community safety partnership work. However, there are a number of similar issues, and there are connections with community policing. I considered urban and rural contexts in my research, although I did not examine the whole of Scotland—that was beyond my remit.
Which urban and rural areas did you consider?
The city of Edinburgh and the Highlands and Islands. It was perceived by the people involved that there were smaller policy networks of people in the more rural settings. While I was conducting the research, partnership work was being very much exhorted by the then Scottish Executive, although it was not statutory, as it was in England and Wales. In both the areas that I examined, partnership working was quite well developed. People perceived and argued that the smaller size of the policy networks in the rural setting allowed the work to be done more informally. People in the different agencies and organisations knew one another, which facilitated such multi-agency work. That goes along with the issues that Dr Donnelly raised about the personalities and the structural issues involved.
Can you draw to the committee's attention any examples of good practice in relation to community policing—whether in rural, urban or urban/rural areas?
There is an interesting example, although it developed after the period of my fieldwork, so I draw much of what I can impart to you from existing documents and from discussion with officers. The Edinburgh capital partnership model has been hailed as an innovative approach. Arguably, it is more about intelligence-led policing than community policing—I will return to the distinction in a moment.
Dr Donnelly, do you have any brief exemplars?
The best examples are areas in which the community police officer has been so successful that, through the good agency of local authorities and the encouragement of the police, community councils and other forums, members of the public phone the local authorities or other agencies and get them to solve the problem of abandoned cars, remove rubbish and deal with numerous other low-level nuisances, without a police officer being approached. The success of community policing is that it gets the community and other agencies and partners to do the job and solve the problems, often without involving the police.
So the community is central.
The community is central. Since the 1970s, the police have been the catalyst and the change agent. They have given confidence, direction and education to numerous agencies and members of the public to achieve end results on their own.
Some full answers earlier have to an extent cut across the issues that we were going to raise, but Paul Martin has a question on that issue.
Dr Donnelly talked about the need for the community to be involved and he used abandoned cars and graffiti as examples. Is there not a role for community police officers in detecting who abandoned the car or graffitied the local school? The public have their role, but what role do the police have in preventing the abandonment of cars by detecting the people who abandon them?
There are instances in which crimes or offences are involved, and the police are the best agent to follow those up. However, in other instances, other agents can deal with enforcement. Many local issues, whether they concern traffic, litter or dog fouling, can be dealt with by other agents and referred directly to the procurator fiscal. Often the police are not involved but, in some instances, they have a duty to track people down and solve offences or crimes.
I do not want to duplicate previous discussions that the committee has had, but there is a drive to reduce the time that police officers spend on such activities. However, what benefit does the community get from that? If the community continues to report abandoned cars but the police do not detect who abandoned them, we end up with a breakdown situation in which people wonder what the point is of reporting graffiti if more appears the following day. That happens in communities. You will remember from your previous life as a chief superintendent some famous graffiti artists who would repeatedly graffiti in local communities but who were never detected. I do not recall ever seeing a headline saying that a community police officer has detected an individual for abandoning a vehicle or for graffiti. Where is the quid pro quo? People should give their time for such issues, because that is their civic duty, but what do they get back?
There are two important issues. First, when it is obvious that there is regularity and that individuals or groups are involved in activities such as abandoning vehicles, obviously the police take that on, and it is their job to do so. However, there could be a spate of abandoned cars that might not involve any crime or offence—it is just that individuals have abandoned vehicles. Other agents can track down those individuals and they can be brought to justice.
Many of my questions have probably been answered, but others have popped up.
I would have to think a bit more about exactly what Professor Skogan meant in his response to an extremely interesting question. He seemed to be saying that because there was a pool of officers, all of whom had responsibility for a particular beat, the abstraction of some officers did not prevent other officers from fulfilling the community role, with the result that there was a continuing presence of officers at the beat meetings. There was never a situation in which officers did not attend the beat meetings or in which there was a lack of continuity in attendance at beat meetings. My impression was that Professor Skogan felt that abstractions were less problematic from that perspective.
Much of what I wanted to ask has been covered, but I have a question on the Scottish concept of community safety partnerships. I am particularly interested in successful partnership examples in individual areas of the much larger area that is the city—in other words, sub-group working in our cities. It is relatively easy for people to work together in a small place where everyone knows everybody and the boundaries are clear, but it is much more difficult to focus appropriate resources to create effective communication networks in areas of a city. Can you point to good examples of partnerships in our cities and say what the characteristics of such good practice are?
The question is a good one, albeit that it is difficult to answer. As I mentioned, the focus of my research was the working processes of partnerships rather than outcomes. There is a need for more research into good practice and what partnerships produce.
Does Dr Donnelly have anything to add to that from his experience?
Again, the city of Glasgow is a good example. The city seems to be successful in pulling together under the community safety partnership umbrella its CCTV and local authority systems and the work of its community wardens, community support officers and community police officers to tackle problems in a meaningful and strategic way. The model is developing but it seems to be showing some success, and some good practice for the rest of Scotland might come out of it.
Dr Donnelly has just referred to community safety partnerships. Mr Henry, who were the partners, and what engagement was there with local community activists or local communities?
Historically, the membership of community safety partnerships has varied throughout Scotland. Police and local authorities are always present. Local public service providers and agencies that are also almost universally represented at the strategic meetings include the health board, fire brigade, education and social work.
We now come to the broader challenges of community policing. Again, due to the comprehensive nature of the answers that we have received, we have covered quite a lot of this already.
Concerns are often raised that community policing is not part of core policing, and that performance management indicators do not fully recognise the breadth of community policing activities. Dr Donnelly, I note that the final paragraph of your written submission to the committee refers to
We have to understand that modern-day community policing is policing. All aspects of community policing and policing are pretty similar, and the majority of policing involves community policing. Regardless of what guise they are in, most police officers do community-style work, whether they are monitoring sex offenders, dealing with victim support or whatever. Part of the problem with community policing is the descriptor; we give it a label.
My question has been answered, but I want to pursue the point about definitions. My understanding is that community police officers engage with local communities through public forums such as tenants associations, residents associations or community councils. I do not expect traffic officers to attend community council meetings to talk about a local speeding campaign or, indeed, expect child protection officers to have the same public engagement. Is it not community police officers who have that kind of engagement?
No. If anyone is obsessed, it is the police organisation or the community. After all, elected members reflect their communities' feelings. Perhaps the media and the police organisation have instilled in the community the impression that the solution in policing is always to have more officers on the beat, which of course translates into community policing in certain ways.
That is a great idea.
There is some interesting stuff there.