Community engagement
Policies and legislation: other Home Office policies
Anti-Social Behaviour Unit
ASBU, working with other government departments, local authorities, businesses, tenants, residents and the public, is seeking to make an immediate and lasting difference to the lives of people who experience anti-social behaviour (ASB) day after day. TOGETHER is a campaign across England and Wales that takes a stand against anti-social behaviour and puts the needs of the local community first. www.together.gov.uk
Community engagement is a key element of the TOGETHER campaign's approach. One of the priorities is to increase the involvement of local residents in local efforts to tackle anti social behaviour. This is both as a way of putting pressure on local agencies to deliver good services in response to community concerns on ASB, and secondly to increase community engagement in local ASB work.
There are four key elements to the work:
Taking A Stand Awards
This annual awards ceremony, in partnership with the Co-op and Crime Concern, recognises the contribution of people who have been witnesses in ASB cases. Year 1 saw 100 nominations and 35 winners. In year 2 - awards ceremony planned for December 2004 - we have had over 500 nominations, and there will be over 100 winners. We are working with Crime Concern to develop a package of training and support for award winners.
Victims and witnesses
Research has been commissioned from Sheffield Hallam University to explore the experiences of people who have been victims or witnesses of ASB. This identified the fear of reprisal as a key barrier to stopping people complaining or becoming a court witness in ASB cases, and as a block to increasing community engagement. One result of this has been the recent announcement by the Department for Constitutional Affairs of special measures for civil cases involving ASB to offer the same level of protection to ASB witnesses as to those provided more routinely in criminal cases.
Action days
Other work is through 10 "Trailblazer" local authorities and 50 action areas. Action days' - community focused events - are being organised in several of these areas. The central message of these is that public services want to respond better to community concerns about ASB, and that residents need to play their part in tackling this problem. Each event generally involves the local authority and the police, plus a minister.
Communications
It is important to communicate locally the priority of tackling ASB in response to community concerns, and the results of successful enforcement action. This is key to increasing community confidence in local ASB work, and key to increasing community engagement in the issue. Research shows that local newspapers are the most effective way of getting these messages across. Research has also found that the public responds most positively to messages that agencies are 'tackling' ASB, and less positively to stories about 'solutions' to ASB problems.
Inspection and audit
In developing measures of community engagement in policing, there needs to be a common understanding of what effective engagement looks like for the Police Service. A description of a police service which is engaging effectively with the community can be found by clicking here
Measures of engagement are necessary to know whether engagement is happening and whether it is effective. The Home Office and the police service have agreed a twin approach to measurement, with some quantitative performance measures included within the Policing Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF) and some assessment questions included within the HMIC baseline assessment.
More information about PPAF can be found at www.policereform.gov.uk/psu/ppaf.html
The development work on measures of engagement has acknowledged the difficulty of setting appropriate performance indicators for national use. Many suggestions were considered – some of which may have value for local use, but which would not meet the PPAF acceptance criteria.
Quantitative survey measures
In the end, the work to develop a PPAF measure of community engagement has not produced a stand-alone Statutory Performance Indicator (SPI). Instead for 2005/6 the PPAF measure of confidence in the police will be supplemented with a set of Key Diagnostic Indicators (KDIs) that go some way towards an assessment of the extent of engagement with communities.
The confidence SPI uses the percentage of people who reply excellent or good to the British Crime Survey (BCS) question ‘How good a job do you think the police in this area are doing?’ This measure is also included as part of the measurement for PSA2.
BCS provides performance information at national and police force level. Although it is a very extensive survey, there are not sufficient responses to provide statistically significant results for each local authority or CDRP.
Research has identified five components of confidence in the police:
- Providing a good service (response time, respect, trust and communication)
- Engagement (familiarity and approachability)
- Fairness (equality and integrity)
- Availability (visibility and accessibility)
- Neighbourhood control (authority and effectiveness)
A new set of questions, based on these components, has been introduced into the BCS to provide a more informative confidence measure.
In addition to the current "how good a job..?" question, the BCS now includes the following:
| Aspects of confidence being measured | |||||
BCS questions: To what extent do you agree or disagree that the police in this area... |
Providing good service |
Engagement |
Fairness |
Availability |
Neighbourhood control |
...can be relied on to be there when you need them |
X |
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X |
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...would treat you with respect if you had contact with them for any reason |
X |
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...treat everyone fairly regardless of who they are |
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X |
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...can be relied on to deal with minor crimes |
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X |
...understand the issues that affect this community |
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X |
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...are dealing with the things that matter to people in this community |
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X |
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X |
Those questioned are asked to indicate if they (a) strongly agree, (b) tend to agree, (c) neither agree nor disagree, (d) tend to disagree or (e) strongly disagree. For each component question, the KDIs report the percentage of people who "strongly agree" or "tend to agree" with the statement.
From October 2004, these new BCS questions give some assessment of police/community engagement through the questions on:
- understanding the issues that affect this community and
- dealing with the things that matter to people in this community
The issues of understanding and responsiveness are addressed by these questions, but they do not pick up on other aspects of engagement, including opportunities to influence policing priorities and the extent and nature of participation.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/bcs1.html
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/patterns1.html
Qualitative assessment
In addition, there are new questions which have been developed for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) baseline assessment framework, which cover issues of community engagement. These questions were included in the new assessment frameworks published at the end of November 2004:
Activity 1B: Neighbourhood Policing and Community Engagement
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Forces will undertake a self-assessment against the frameworks in January/February 2005.
Future development
Further effort will be directed to developing meaningful, comparable national measures of engagement. The development work will be reported to the PPAF Citizen Focus Project Board and the PPAF Steering Group as part of the PPAF 2006/7 development.
The existing work to develop BCS questions will be shared with forces and police authorities to help them in the development of local surveys.
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