A Starting Point for Community Safety: Sir Robert Peel

Policing has lost its way, says Jim Nixon, RHE Global’s director of community safety. He suggests that it should address the causes of ASB and commit officers to ‘back to the beat’, cooperating with multi-agency partners.

Jim Nixon, anti-social behaviour expert and award-winning blogger, has professionally experienced almost three decades of legislation and practice in his field. As a police officer, from 1995, he was an early exponent of neighbourhood policing in Sandwell and Walsall in the West Midlands, working in two tough areas of multiple deprivation.

The early days of New Labour, from 1997, he recalls, brought the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. Community safety partnerships and plans were born, as well as anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), which were found to be useful but set to become controversial – New Labour’s fist in a velvet glove.

The innovation of ‘joined up’ multi-agency partnership working, bringing together the police with council services, including environmental health, housing and social services was extremely well-resourced in those days, in modern terms.

A historical record of this ‘golden age’ of inter-agency cooperation was the early BBC TV reality series, ‘A Life of Grime’, which first aired in 1999. EHOs from Haringey Council in London were shown sympathetically and patiently dealing with a persistent hoarder, Mr Trebus – not just cleaning up his filthy and verminous house but seeking to get the root of his problems and to bring in other agencies. Could that happen today?

Neighbourhood policing benefitted from ring-fenced funding and was a key strand of well-resourced local authority regeneration projects. Nixon remembers, of his time in Smethwick, in Sandwell:?

“We were eight police officers assigned to a very deprived beat and dealing with everything. It could be low-level ASB, or it could be burglaries or armed robberies. We got to know everybody and everything that went on. We’d cover miles. We didn’t have a car. We would only use a car if we had to arrest somebody.

“Our role was to engage with the public and to get good-quality intelligence. In terms of drug issues, we didn’t just tackle the dealers, we talked about rehabilitation with drug users. So it was a holistic service.”?

Change of emphasis

Public sector budgets were slashed from 2010, with the austerity-led policies of the Coalition. More than a decade of continuing cuts has drastically reduced the footprint of local government, not least environmental health services.

The youth services that were so successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s in keeping young people out of trouble are a distant memory and the concept of neighbourhood policing is virtually dead. Nixon reflects, “Police numbers are so low that even if you are on a neighbourhood team, you will invariably be used for response duties, on a daily basis.”

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act of 2014 was a milestone. A tidying-up exercise, it amalgamated 19 sets of ASB powers into only six, including public spaces protection orders, which ban specific acts in designated areas and are enforced by fixed penalties, issued by the police. It also attached civil injunctions to ASB measures, thereby reducing their evidential burden.

Many of the measures were opposed for impinging on civil liberties or even for criminalising lifestyles. But, to some extent, they were an inevitable response to a thinly resourced policing system, in which community outreach could only be regarded as a luxury. They were also an attempt, suggests Nixon, to bring the English and Welsh police services under the firm grip of national control.?

That endeavour continues to elude governments. Under the present arrangements, it is virtually impossible. Nixon reflects, “I've said this for a long time. You’ve got 43 forces in England and Wales, they’ve all got separate procurement arrangements and databases. They are all doing their own thing.”

It should be no surprise, given the flavour of current national politics, that the latest iteration of national ASB policy, the Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, published in March, rings the changes on some familiar post-Coalition themes. It employs catchphrases, such as ‘hotspot policing’, ‘immediate justice’ and ‘zero tolerance’, it criminalises new behaviours, such as begging at cashpoints or cars at traffic lights, and increases the upper limits of spot fines. The plan focuses on enforcement and punishment, rather than addressing the causes of ASB or even acknowledging that they should be tackled.

Police are the experts

The police and their community support officers are the experts on ASB. They are normally the first on the scene when things go wrong. But the police, currently, Nixon says, are suffering from an ‘identity crisis’. Much maligned, especially the Met, they don’t know what they are supposed to be, or what they are supposed to be doing. In practice, they are picking up the casualties of the collapse of multiple public services.

Nixon says, “You’ve got police officers sat there for hours and hours in A&E departments and police stations, dealing with mental health issues. That’s why you’re not seeing police officers on the streets.”

He adds, “Enforcement is only part of the solution. There needs to be a massive shift to early intervention, as far back as nursery school years, and a massively increased investment in preventive and reactive mental health services.”

This should be accompanied, he argues, by a radical reset of the role and remit of the crisis-ridden police services of England and Wales. How about a wide-ranging royal commission, he suggests? The issue is large and important enough to merit one. It could do worse than to reference the principles of policing that were articulated in 1829, by the founder of London Metropolitan Police Force, Sir Robert Peel.?

Back to basics

In paraphrase, ‘Peelism’ states that policing should ‘prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment; that the power of the police is dependent on public approval of their existence; that the police should exercise their powers with courtesy and good humour and that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action’. It’s not a bad starting point, Nixon suggests.

We have technology now – phones and laptops to share data, communicate with colleagues and access guidance on complex legislation. The successful model of RHE Global’s 'The Noise App' could easily be extended to other areas of enforcement. And, of course, we have CCTV and drones. Unfortunately, local authorities, like police forces, are all going their own way – we are using only a fraction of the potential of technology.?

The primary focus of community safety should not be enforcement, Nixon says. That should be a last resort. It should be more about preventing problems from happening and nipping them in the bud. Technology should be used as a tool to facilitate this, not as an end in itself. But first, we need to achieve some consensual basic principles. Sir Robert Peel, he suggests, gave us a good place to start, two hundred years ago.

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