What if the UK Policing Bill was REALLY about making us safer?

With the nation's attention focused on "partygate", a major moment in UK democracy passed almost unnoticed in the media last week as the House of Lords effectively cut out some of the worst elements of Priti Patel's Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. It wasn't unnoticed by citizens though: this was a profound intervention, one driven by a huge civil society effort on the part of both established organisations like Liberty, complemented by some incredible grassroots citizen energy. Digital Rebellion, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, played a major role in building direct public pressure on Peers, and perhaps most inspiring of all was a movement of citizen-minded business leaders pulled together largely over LinkedIn by the amazing efforts of two individuals: Matt Golding and Charlotte Sewell.

I found all this deeply inspiring, and was a keen supporter. With at least a partial, rearguard victory won, though, and knowing there is more to do to protect what should be considered basic rights for many, I find my thoughts turning to how we could ever have got to the stage where we were reliant on an outdated, unelected group like the Lords to prevent a significant step towards authoritarianism - and in particular, to the mindset that shapes this kind of attitude to policing in the first place.

In my view, it's yet another manifestation of the breakdown and failure of what I call the Consumer Story: a story which focuses attention on symptoms, individuals, and what "sells"; rather than on root causes, systems, and what actually works. The basis of the Consumer Story is that humans are inherently lazy and selfish. As such, "crime" is bad individuals who cannot be bothered to earn a better life trying to cheat their way there instead - and policing is about stopping that. The policies that "sell" as a result are about numbers of police on the streets. Hence Boris Johnson standing amongst ranks of the police in the run up to the General Election in 2019 (image from the Independent), talking about a campaign to recruit 20,000 extra officers - and Priti Patel trying to ram through a massive expansion of policing powers.

We live in times that feel increasingly unsafe, on a very deep level, and it is therefore understandable that crime should be such a high political priority. But the more I've thought about this, the more I've come to believe that such a shallow, symptomatic response is not only insufficient, but that it actually serves to make things worse.

No one has made this point more articulately than Zach Norris, the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, and author of the profoundly insightful book We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just and Inclusive Communities. Norris argues that the focus on crime, and on criminalising individuals, actually serves to increase fear and insecurity, by focusing our attention on them and making us believe that these bad people are everywhere - and in doing so serves to distract us from the deep "harms" that are really compromising public safety at a systemic level, including by creating the kind of insecurity that drives people to more obvious forms of crime in the first place. He argues that there is a need for a fundamental shift in how the US aims to achieve public safety, from a "framework of fear" to a "culture of care", an approach that has four key pillars.

For Norris, this approach is about initiatives like Universal Basic Income, which put "resources" in people's hands; and like restorative justice, which brings those who have perpetrated criminal acts together with their victims to heal, rather than locking them up and throwing away the key. He provides some profound examples of this work in action - and indeed is working on them himself, with the Ella Baker Center now integrated into a restorative-justice-focused community facility called Restore Oakland.

I then came across the work of the Institute for Community Studies, which set out to develop its research agenda in 2020 by asking people in communities across the country what mattered most to them. Safety came out top - but they had the same insight as Norris. This wasn't so much about individual criminals, as the profound question "Can I look to others?"

So what might the kind of deeper approach Zach Norris talks about look like here in the UK? What would a Policing Bill that really made us safer look like?

The short answer, I believe, is that it would focus not on creating more crimes, removing rights, and seeking to instil fear in "bad people" - but would instead reposition the police as a community resource, as people who trust and build relationships.

The medium-length answer, if you're inspired to go deeper, was something I was lucky enough to explore in depth with some brilliant people. I introduced the Institute for Community Studies to Zach Norris, and we opened up the conversation to some brilliant others too, including Kevin Ditcham of Police Scotland, and Donna Hall, former CEO of Wigan Council and now Chair of New Local. The recording of that conversation is at the bottom of this article. We don't have a next step for this work yet, but I'd love your thoughts.

And the long answer? I believe that it goes way beyond policing, and to that deep underlying story. We need to shift our idea of the individual from Consumer to Citizen, opening up the question of how we create a safer society, and holding it together - not just finding the policy that sells on the doorstep today. There are now ways to do this, through participatory democracy processes such as Citizens' Assemblies, and through devolving meaningful power to the local level and indeed to individuals.

But that's what my book is about...