Community safety is nobody's problem

No-one would say that crime and policing, or local government, are in a ‘good place’ in the UK. It adds up to an environment in which antisocial behaviour, which is often perpetrated by the victims of multiple service failures, is falling between the cracks – a problem affecting everybody that is owned by nobody.

It was a bad year for policing, following a terrible two decades. The police’s professional reputation which failed to recover following the damning verdict of ‘institutional racism’ delivered by the Macpherson Report in 1999, has diminished even further. Fallout following the murder by Minnesota police of George Floyd in 2020 led to a UK version of ‘black lives matter’.

Since then, we have experienced the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, the police’s mishandling of the subsequent Clapham Common vigil, the forced departure from office of Met Police commissioner, Cressida Dick and her successor, Sir Mark Rowley, being forced to vigorously defend a London police service that is widely perceived by the left as being ‘racist’ and, by the right, as excessively ‘woke’. 

In 2023, the Met Police lurched deeper into crisis, meanwhile councils faced the prospect of even smaller budgets. This year, an ‘ASB action plan’ launched in March recycled buzz words such as ‘hotspot policing’, ‘immediate justice’ and, an old favourite, ‘zero tolerance’. The ‘community trigger’, a power available under the 2014 Crime and Policing Act, a mechanism for bringing together professionals, has been relabelled by as a ‘community case review’.

It wasn't a year that changed anything – more cuts, more deckchair shuffling, more irrelevant announcements, designed to please right-wing newspapers and social media influencers. In the face of a breakdown of multiple professional services, life for all of us is more dangerous and uncivil – the world is less secure and so are the places where we live.

The crime that councils cater to, labelled thematically as ‘community safety’ covers multiple areas, some extremely serious. They include, in ascending order of life-or-death seriousness,

graffiti and fly-tipping, street drinking, neighbour disputes, for example over noise, safeguarding issues, domestic abuse, knife crime. In many cases, they are not ‘owned’ by a particular service but covered by many.  

Today, virtually all public services are thinly stretched – most front-line council line staff have retreated to their core professional roles, for example in food safety, housing management or environmental protection. In many areas, resources for police community support officers (PCSOs) and other street-level enforcement services have virtually disappeared.

No-one walks the beat anymore or ‘owns’ the streets. The police are covering far too many bases, including dealing with victims of the virtual collapse of mental health services – lost souls trapped in an endless limbo of custody suites and hospital A&E departments – while their charge and prosecution rates for crime are falling. Everyone agrees that psychiatric care is not the police's job. But whose job is it?  

Micro-managed by vote-seeking politicians, police services are suffering from a deepening identity crisis – what are they actually for? No-one knows and no-one is seeking to adress a policy issue that seems –  like the funding of social care or the composition of the UK's second chamber – to be just too large and intractable to solve. Our political systems, not fit-for-purpose, cannot reform themselves. It's a death spiral – a narrative of ineluctable decline.

Role of technology

In terms of communiy safety, It’s all the more important then, says consultant and ASB professioanal, Jim Nixon, formerly a police officer, for the multiple agencies that operate alongside the police to work more efficiently and to reduce their overheads. This is where technology can play a vital role, complementing the skills and judgement of trained professionals.

Councils and housing associations dealing with antisocial behaviour often used to ask tenants to keep ‘diaries’ logging day-to-day instances of noise nuisance and other forms of antisocial behaviour. They can now make smartphone enabled apps available to their tenants. Evidence is definitively captured that can inform solutions, or, in some cases, be used as evidenced in court. Supporting media can be attached and video recordings are automatically edited to provide GPS tagged and time and date stamped extracts.

This year, a report from the housing ombudsman highlighted the systematic failures of a well-known housing association, to deal with multiple noise issues raised by a vulnerable tenant that had contributed to his suicide.

The use of apps can saving officer time and costs for enforcement services by up to four-fifths. It also, argues Nixon, helps to highlight systemic or structural issues, so that noise problems can be prevented rather than merely reacted to – for example, by better neighbour management policies or, for new properties and refurbs, more stringent building regulations.

Nixon says: “Landlords may try to push a noise issue down the ASB route when, actually, it has nothing to do with ASB. It may be caused by hard flooring, or poor sound insulation. Landlords should work harder to find out what’s going on, before they start labelling people as ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’.”

Nixon is a believer in the ground rules that were laid down for the Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel, in 1829. They hold that it’s best to work within a framework or community consent and that the test of enforcement efficiency is “the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of action”. 

Suella Braverman our last Home Secretary, did not follow the precepts of the founder of modern policing. She was probably unaware of them. But she is Home Secretary no longer. That’s the thing with this area of policy. New politicians arrive frequently, muddying waters that had not been allowed to settle since the last one. Ill-informed, and short-term in outlook, they play up to headlines and gimmicks, rather than looking systematically at policy paradigms and cause and effect. It's one of the UK's long-term problems.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.