Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

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THE ROLE OF POLICE Neighbourhood policing Police and crime commissioners will need to continue to evolve key neighbourhood policing processes and systems. By Professor Martin Innes Martin Innes is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University Neighbourhood policing’s (NP) DNA derives from the community policing family. Since the mid-2000s it has come to provide a key platform for the delivery of many local policing services to the public across England and Wales. Where it has evolved from its community policing ancestors is in its attempt to develop a more programmed, structured and systematic approach. This is important because several commentators have attended to how the lack of definition associated with community policing has frequently led to its failure to really embed within policing agencies, reducing it to little more than a rhetorical construct 1 . Moreover, as Herbert 2 notes, police have tended to over-estimate the interest, capacity and capability of communities to engage in community policing. With the result that any such reforms rapidly unravel because communities cannot ‘bear the weight of expectation’ that community policing places upon them. There were two key influences upon the initial development of NP: the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS); and the National Reassurance Policing Programme (NRPP). The former provided an example of a sustained effort to implement a community policing strategy ‘at scale’ and to re-engineer key components of the Chicago Police organisation to enable this. Equally important was how it was subject to a detailed and independent process and outcome evaluation – something notably absent from many earlier community policing programmes. This evaluation provided clear evidence of what worked, what did not, and what benefits were accrued by police in Chicago 3 . The findings from CAPS shaped the quasi-experimental forerunner of NP in England and Wales – the NRPP. The NRPP was established to test the capacity of an appropriately configured policing to influence public confidence and reassurance in light of the fact that, although crime rates had been dropping “Police have tended to overestimate the interest, capacity and capability of communities to engage in community policing.” 62 | POLICING UK
THE ROLE OF POLICE “It will be important for police and crime commissioners and police to continue to evolve key neighbourhood policing processes and systems.” since the mid-1990s, these were not being tracked by public perceptions. The NRPP approach was organised around three principal components: increasing local police presence by making officers visible, accessible and familiar to the public, and ensuring they act effectively to control problems; ‘tuning’ the police response to focus upon the signal crimes and disorders that change how people think, feel and act in relation to their neighbourhood security by implementing a systematic community engagement methodology to diagnose what matters to people locally 4 ; and encouraging a shift towards ‘coproducing’ solutions with partner agencies and local communities to try and increase traction and sustainability, and build the social capacity of communities. These parts were designed to be interacting and interlocking in terms of operational delivery. The implementation of this approach was trialled in 16 sites, in eight police forces across England and the early results from a Home Office evaluation were sufficiently positive that a decision was taken to ‘roll the approach out’ nationwide 5 . In the process it was re-branded as ‘neighbourhood policing’ and some simplifications of the core components introduced. One of the key decisions attached to the national implementation was to establish neighbourhood officers as dedicated to that task. They were assigned to an area and could not be ‘abstracted’ for other duties. This reflected learning from previous community policing reforms, where impact was routinely diffused by community officers being used to respond to emergencies and other non-local issues. It was also coherent with the more general tendency within British policing to understand policing as comprising a series of specialist roles, requiring particular skills and expertise. While there seems to be broad public and political support for NP, in an age of austerity some important questions are starting to be raised about whether the core processes and systems remain sustainable. There is certainly a case for thinking more innovatively about how NP assets could be used in respect of a wider range of problems. For example, in many forces, deliberate connections have been established between NP Teams (NPTs) and the ‘prevent’ strand of counterterrorism policing. There might be similar opportunities for thinking about impacting upon serious organised crime groups. There are also opportunities for development in taking community engagement more seriously. NP maintained the commitment to engagement seeded by the NRPP, but in the vast majority of forces this came to centre upon ‘PACT’ or ‘beat meetings’. While of some value in ascertaining public priorities, these are frequently not well attended – thus reducing their weight as a vehicle for public accountability. They are far less structured and systematic than the engagement pioneered under the auspices of the NRPP. Recent research on ‘community intelligence-led policing’ – which seeks to blend intelligence-led policing’s disciplined approaches to information analysis to drive focused policing interventions with an NP framework – shows how, by developing a ‘rich’ community intelligence picture through systematic community engagement, it is possible for police to intervene in a targeted fashion against public priorities 4,6 . In the context of ongoing reductions in funding this could leverage ‘smarter’ policing. So, for example, rather than launching a multi-agency drug-crime initiative across a whole city, it might be possible to locate limited resources in those neighbourhoods where drugs problems are impacting upon the public’s quality of life. Similarly, rather than spreading traffic enforcement assets ‘thinly’ across all areas, they could be directed to where such issues are doing most harm. NP will undoubtedly be important for police and crime commissioners (PCCs). The officers on NPTs, of all the specialisms and units that collectively constitute modern police forces, have the most natural affinity with the core mission of the PCC role. That is, to give communities a voice and to have police be responsive to these expressed crime and security needs. This natural sympathy notwithstanding, it will be important for PCCs and police to continue to evolve key NP processes and systems. Indeed, there is a feeling that NP has been rather neglected of late, because it is viewed as a relative success. But given the remit of PCCs, it is unlikely that this policy of benign neglect will continue. 1 Fielding, N. (1995) Community Policing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2 Herbert, S. (2006) Citizens, Cops and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 3 Skogan, W. (2006) Police and Community in Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press. 4 Innes, M., Abbott, L., Lowe, T. and Roberts, C. (2008) ‘Seeing like a citien field experiments in community intelligence-led policing’, Police Practice and Research, 10/2: 99-114. 5 Tuffin, ., et al. (2006) The National eassurance Policing Programme A six site evaluation. London Home Office 6 Lowe, T. and M. Innes (2012, in press) ‘Can we speak in confidence Community intelligence and Neighbourhood Policing v2.0’, Policing and Society. POLICING UK | 63
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