Last week I was asked to speak at a Public Policy Exchange seminar on the subject of Working in Partnership to Tackle Hate Crime in Every Community. As I was a stand in for someone who had dropped out I felt that I had carte blanche to cover any area that I wanted. After much thought I decided to cover the fact that I believe that the police will not be able to fulfil this criteria. And I do believe this to be true.
There is little doubt that the focus on modern day policing is on crime fighting and rapid response, two of the elements that have caused concern for Goldstein, Alderson, and many other academics. It is an area that regularly reappears on the police reform agenda. So who undertakes the community engagement aspect of policing, especially with minority groups? Note that I have not used the term ‘hard to reach groups’ as I do not believe that there is any such thing. I believe that if sufficient effort is made, then all groups can be engaged.
The austerity measures will undoubtedly have an impact on front line policing, a fact supported the day after my presentation by the Chief Constable of Lancashire Constabulary on national TV. Chief Constable Finnigan is the lead for the ACPO performance portfolio and on the Lancashire Police web site states "The Chief Constable originally said that the Constabulary may have to lose 1000 posts over this difficult period, but the review process has identified that this is more likely to be around 800 in total. This split is likely to be around two thirds police officers and a third police staff. It is so far anticipated that around only 160 officer posts will come from what we call frontline posts which are visible to the public.” This is surely reflective of the state of policing across the UK; however, I am not too sure that other Chiefs are being so honest and transparent.
Most Constabularies speak of cuts to the middle and back office, roles that will likely include researchers and analysts, people who play a key role in identifying patterns and trends of crime, including hate crime. So who is involved in prevention or detection of such crimes?
The prevention often takes the form of engaging with the community, including minority communities, by police officers, PCSOs or those engaged in specialist roles including Community Relations or Diversity. But we know that some of these roles will be reduced. In brief – the support function to prevent hate crime is being dismantled. So let’s have a look at detection function. Following the publication of the MacPherson report a number of police forces sought to develop a bespoke crime investigation function to investigate hate crime. The idea was that the new teams would be staffed with trained detectives and would be managed and lead by a supervisor who was also a detective. However, over time this role was eroded as the trained officers were moved to new roles.
Those that suffer hate crime are amongst the most vulnerable in society. The fear for those at the seminar was that it will take another crisis such as that which followed the death of Stephen Lawrence or Fiona Pilkintgon for the police to once again take hate crime seriously.
The problem is that if the police do not undertake the role of managing or leading partnerships who will? The voluntary sector is facing as many cuts as the police. If the solution is the Big Society, then I believe that we are in big trouble. The Big Society was raised at the seminar but no-one was able to identify how this will help vulnerable communities.
The symposium agreed that the police have to take this issue seriously before another vulnerable person is badly hurt or even worse, loses their life.
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