Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

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.
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