Examination of Witnesses (Questions 79-99)
17 SEPTEMBER 2003
DAVID BAINES,
RHYS GRIFFITHS,
PAUL TAYLOR
AND DEREK
CARTWRIGHT
Q79 Chairman: Could I welcome you
to this session of the Committee's inquiry into social cohesion
and ask you to identify yourselves for the record?
Mr Taylor: Station Commander Paul
Taylor. I am I am the Station Commander at Oldham Fire Station.
Mr Cartwright: I am Derek Cartwright.
I am the Director of Operations for Greater Manchester Ambulance
Service.
Mr Baines: I am David Baines.
I am the Chief Superintendent, Greater Manchester Police and I
am the Police Commander for Oldham Division.
Mr Griffiths: I am Rhys Griffiths.
I am the Senior Divisional Officer and Area Commander for the
Oldham, Rochdale, Bury and Tameside areas of Greater Manchester
Fire Service.
Q80 Chairman: Thank you very much.
I understand one or two of you want to make brief opening statements.
Mr Taylor: In the submissions
provided to this Committee Greater Manchester Fire Service offers
the view that greater emphasis on longer term initiatives is necessary
if sustainable inter-community cohesion is to be achieved. Principal
considerations are funding streams, availability and duration,
greater involvement of the Fire Service at strategic level and
far more inter-community engagement. The Fire Service is uniquely
placed to assist in this process by virtue of its neutrality and
ability to engage across all communities, thereby addressing the
fractures that are presently being identified. In response to
the Ritchie Report, Greater Manchester Fire Service has seconded
a firefighter from Oldham Fire Station to work full time on developing
inter-community initiatives. Over the past 18 months he has successfully
worked with the voluntary sector, other organisations and singularly
within the borough. Many of the initiatives have involved disaffected
youths.
Mr Cartwright: Since the difficulties
in this area some two years ago Greater Manchester Ambulance Service
has focused on three broad themes. First of all is the work in
the community on the ground and this is basically around help
in the community of which our staff are very aware. They work
in the estates and on the ground in people's houses every day
of the year, and that has given us a unique position in that environment
to be able to work within that community in terms of drugs, in
terms of developing schemes which will bind together the community
on the ground. Another area is to develop cultural awareness amongst
our staff, and this has been a major piece of work that has been
going on over the last two years across Greater Manchester but
in particular in challenged areas such as Oldham, and to improve
the organisational population to ensure it properly represents
the community which it serves in terms of cultural mix. Those
are the three broad things to which we have been working.
Mr Baines: David Baines from Greater
Manchester Police. Having taken command of the division in January
2002 I was tasked with the responsibility of looking at the comments
within the Ritchie report and implementing them with a change
of structure as to how we delivered policing services within the
Oldham area. Two key issues were to make officers more accountable
to the communities they serve and in particular the distinct communities
they serve. A copy of that restructure document has been supplied
to the Committee together with our response to Ritchie. Other
issues that are key to our approach are the rebuilding of structures
both internally within our organisation but also with partners
so that we are able to respond to some of the key issues raised
by Ritchie, not least with the media, myth busting, dealing with
rumour and innuendo on a very speedy basis, and you should have
found that in some of your evidence about the number of meeting
structures that take place within Oldham and with our partner
communities.
Q81 Mr Clelland: Can I ask you all
about your work in identifying and tackling tensions between different
communities and how you work with the council and other public
agencies in doing that?
Mr Taylor: Following the riots
we identified that we were able to move within communities because
we have been regarded as unbiased. Consequently, we found that
we had something to offer but we did not know where to turn. The
County Fire Officer, Barry Dixon, then instigated the provision
of a local liaison officer, fire fighter Jeff Leach, who then
undertook to contact the voluntary sector and other providers
within the community in order first to identify what role the
Fire Service could play. They found that we were able to offer
life skills provision and instruction and education within Fire
Service premises in a project that was called "Fire Team
Experience". It has been such a success that the local providers
of funds have taken it upon themselves to invite us to look at
a more strategic approach across the Greater Manchester area and
perhaps have the provision of funds made to duplicate the efforts
that have been made in Oldham.
Mr Cartwright: In common with
other parts of Greater Manchester, but in particular certain areas
of Oldham, we have developed some community schemes where there
is partnership with the community. We are aware, of course, that
there are sub-groups within the community where there are frictions
and we have been working in areas such as Glodwick and St Mary's
to develop community responder schemes which not only helps to
have real impact on the people in that area in terms of life saving
activities, but also brings people together in those particular
communities, and that has been an ongoing programme. It has been
very successful in other parts of Oldham, in Diddle and Delph
and it is work that is ongoing. It is not easy and it is not going
to be something that is going to be completed over next week but
it is a progressing issue that we have apportioned resources to
in terms of a community responder manager focusing on that particular
project. Also, we have employed a race relations manager who is
helping to get into the communities to ensure that we make maximum
impact when we have recruiting campaigns so that we can be properly
representative of the communities which we serve.
Mr Baines: It is bread and butter
stuff, obviously, for policing, particularly after the experiences
of 2001. First of all, to talk about the force, how have we responded
to whether we have enough information about intelligence to do
with community hate and tensions? We found that we were missing
some information at a force level because ostensibly there are
two types of race incident that come to our attention. One is
the straightforward racially aggravated crime which features the
criminal law, and the other is described as a hate incident which
can be a perception that without breaching the law somebody dealt
with me differently because of either the colour of my skin or
my ethnicity. Structurally, we have merged those two systems so
that any hate incident or racial crime is reported and recorded
as if it were a hate crime; in other words, there is a single
reporting system, so we capture trend data both on the criminal
offences themselves but also on conduct and behaviour issues that
run parallel to it. Does that make sense?
Q82 Mr Clelland: Yes, but my question
really is about how the force interacts with the local authority
and other agencies working on these problems.
Mr Baines: Those issues coming
together form the basis of our weekly meetings with the Race Crime
Incident Group meeting that brings in housing and education and
covers every single incident that is discussed, whether it be
a hate crime or a hate incident, so that we are able to bring
our collective responses together in partnership terms to make
sure that we tackle any emergent trends or the specific incidents
on a partnership basis.
Mr Griffiths: To add to Paul Taylor's
comments, as well as the work that is being done on the ground
by our community firefighter Jeff Leach, we have at strategic
level appointed a community outreach worker in the brigade and
we have made great efforts to remove barriers to recruitment and
have improved cultural awareness training amongst our firefighters.
I also meet regularly with the local councillors who represent
Oldham MBC on the Greater Manchester Fire Authority.
Q83 Mr Clelland: You say that you
have worked on the ground. How do front line workers in your three
organisations work together on these issues on the ground?
Mr Baines: First and foremost
the thing that followed on from Ritchie was the restructuring
of the divisions to match our partner agency boundaries so we
adopted the nearest thing that was there with our partners, which
was the ward system and the area committees, which ostensibly
identified the different communities of Oldham and enabled us
to bespoke-tailor our policing service and style to service their
needs in a sensitive way. That also enabled us to identify key
community beat officers who work in the different areas. I think
you met Phil Buckley(?), who is one of those officers, and again
there is continuity and consistency in building trust and confidence
between the community and ourselves. That was at the front end.
In addition, behind that we have an inspector who runs each area
and who is the nominated figurehead for policing in their area
and ensuring consistent service. We speak almost on a daily basis
or incident basis with officers engaging directly with Ambulance
or Fire If there are any concerns across our three agencies in
dealing with an incident, we normally initiate it because we will
take the first call as police. We will raise issues about risk
assessment (or there may be a race element included in it), or
whether there is anything we need to be aware of so that we can
give our operational officers as much information as possible
to make them as effective as possible.
Mr Cartwright: Just to touch again
on how the services work together, there are common themes in
terms of the 999 Challenges, which all three services support
with youth in Oldham and in Rochdale. The more recent one has
been about rebuilding the canal boat and that type of thing, working
together on projects, and the Crucial Crew type of initiative
where we have trained 2,200 young people in Oldham over the last
12-18 months, 10-11 year olds from all communities, in different
aspects of each service.
Q84 Dr Pugh: Can I ask you for a
little bit of clarity on this definition of race crime or hate
crime? You seem to say that you include in hate crime and race
crime two types of things: one where there is a gratuitous insult
or attack on somebody because of their race, but you also include
in the race crime an incident where there is an element of racial
aggravation in a quite ordinary crime, a burglary, an assault
or whatever, and those are all put together under the one heading.
Mr Baines: Yes. We are able to
break them down but what is important is that we identify every
incident that has a racial element or potential racial element
to it. In line with the Lawrence definition of what racism is,
if any person perceives it to be racist it is recorded as such.
Sometimes those incidents will not be a straightforward breach
of the criminal law but they will be an indication, for instance,
name-calling that is offensive and affects quality of life issues.
Road rage incidents are the obvious one where people have cut
someone up and generally there will be, "This person went
past and they were mouthing. I do not know what they said but
I am pretty sure it had some racial element".
Q85 Dr Pugh: So if somebody comes
to the police station and makes an allegation the allegation may
not be substantial enough for it to be worthwhile following up
in order to get a conviction but it will still be recorded, it
will still be logged and it will still be there in the stats?
Mr Baines: Yes. To simplify it,
where a traffic warden has booked a person for a breach of the
criminal law, there may be an allegation such as, "I have
been treated differently and your actions were racist", so
that would be recorded as an incident.
Q86 Dr Pugh: And, observing all your
statistics, what are the trends at the moment?
Mr Baines: Up to the riots of
2001, and I have brought documents to show this, we jumped literally
from an average of about 40 per month before the riots to 100
in the month before the riots, then through the month of the riots
we had 350, and then it dropped dramatically and stayed level
at about 100 incidents per month until December 2001. Since then
we have seen a significant decline, even though we have merged
those two systems together, and we are running now on average
at about 40-45 incidents a month, and that has remained constant.
The interesting factor is that whilst we have remained constant
in Oldham other divisions are reporting significant levels and
are reaching the levels that we recorded. Historically Oldham
always had at least twice as many racist incidents as other divisions
or areas.
Q87 Dr Pugh: The Association of Chief
Police Officer's Optional Guide for the Management of Inter-Ethnic
Conflicts emphasises, in addition to the usual tasks, matters
like restoring peace, keeping the peace, building peace and doing
something called managing normality. What special skills are now
required for these new tasks on the part of the force?
Mr Baines: I think managing normality,
depending which area you go into, is a very grey area. There is
no formal training in managing normality. It is very much based
on a judgmental decision by police commanders on the ground about
how you deal with a particular issue.
Q88 Dr Pugh: What about building
peace?
Mr Baines: Most of that is by
the structured response of how we take forward police action in
those areas where people are suspicious of police activity and
how we build confidence and trust in the police afterwards.
Q89 Chairman: Can we pursue a little
bit this question of racially motivated crime and the higher offence
that it causes? It was put to me yesterday by an individual that
there was a problem in that you could only really count it as
the higher offence if you got a conviction but the temptation
was that you put in a prosecution and then just before it got
to the court doors the Crown Prosecution Service and the defence
solicitor cut a deal, which meant that you withdrew the more serious
offence for a guilty plea on the lesser offence. There are two
consequences of that. One is that it ceases to go down as a conviction
for racially motivated crime and, secondly, as far as the magistrates
are concerned, when they are looking for orders for them to make
in terms of punishment or accepting their responsibilities, they
cannot send them to those people who might be trying to deal with
racial difficulties.
Mr Baines: The figures and statistics
I quote are very much as reported and are not affected by the
consequence of conviction later.
Q90 Chairman: No, but there is a
criticism of the police that you get these high levels at the
start and you get very low levels at the bottom and I was trying
to pursue whether you were happy with the way in which deals were
cut before court.
Mr Baines: Talking about deals
cut before court, it will be the identification of the facts by
either the barrister or the solicitor who is prosecuting a case
and quite often they will say, "I am not content that we
will be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the racial
element perceived by your victim can be proved at court, and I
have got an admission and I suggest that you take it". There
is a tension between those and indeed most of you will know about
Walter Chamberlain, who was the elderly gentleman who was severely
bruised and featured all over the national newspapers. When that
matter was dealt with at court we actively pursued the issue of
racial motivation and it was directed by the judge that there
was insufficient evidence that this assault was any more than
loutish behaviour and was not racist. There is a difference and
there is a tension. Our actions are taken to get as many prosecutions
as possible and, where clear racism or a racist element exists,
to provide best evidence to allow cause to sentence appropriately.
Q91 Chris Mole: What feedback are
you currently getting about the level of tension between communities
in Oldham? Has the situation changed significantly since the situation
two years ago?
Mr Baines: Yes. There will be
two levels. We have a formalised meeting where every agency can
implement both the formal and the informal level, so there is
a cascading down and a receiving back on a weekly basis of what
tensions are taking place. Equally, every one of the local authorities
has a contact number with myself and a relevant area inspector
to make it happen, and if there are issues of tension starting
to emerge I will get a phone call, I have no doubt about it. In
fact, I have had several this morning relating to two key issues
that are starting to raise some tensions in the community, and
I have just picked up on one of them to do with the selection
of the management team for the Pakistani community centre.
Q92 Chris Mole: You mentioned local
authorities. What about channels of communication with the local
communities themselves? What do you have?
Mr Baines: The local authority
have set up via their area committee meetings regular meetings
with their communities across the board about any issues of concern.
We have negotiated a police presence on each of those meetings
that take place virtually on a monthly basis, so the community
can come with the less urgent issues about tensions and concerns
that take place. Our intelligence network, as far as how we record
tensions and what is evidenced in that, operates on a daily basis
to every officer, and any information that comes in is reported
to us, whether it is actually reported as a racist incident or
it is reported that there are tensions taking place. They feed
into the system. We have produced a grid or matrix of what tensions
exist across the board and we split those into four issues for
discussion. One is racist issues that are straightforward racist.
Another is crime issues that are affecting communities. Another
is economic and the other is political. Those are the four key
areas we look at to identify which is the key agency that should
lead on any one. Obviously, racist issues and crime issues I lead
on. If it is political there is a reference across into Andrew
Kilburn, the Chief Executive, for discussion there, and if it
is economic it is fed into the local authority, whether it be
housing, education, health, so that it can be taken forward to
whoever is most appropriate to deal with that issue.
Q93 Chris Mole: There is a view that
in some communities the community leaders tend to be older men.
How do you try to communicate with women and younger people?
Mr Baines: The Greater Manchester
Police Authority has a separate section in it which is the Greater
Manchester Police Youth Workers, and following the riots they
have worked extensively with those groups of hard-to-reach people,
with Asian females particularly, and also young people, although
it has to be said that it is predominantly young men, particularly
in the Asian community. Once the concerns are expressed by the
youth worker a meeting is set up via myself with those, so there
is an opportunity to get hard-to-reach groups in a full scale,
head-on, what-is working-and-what-is-not meeting to discuss what
their concerns are, why they think the policing approach is difficult
or different. Those meetings take place either in specific youth
clubs or specific community sections via specific schools, and
have led to a sort of engagement at various levels. What we were
finding was common concerns being expressed about policing by
young people regardless of race or colour. They were the same
issues but the perceptions attached to them were different. For
example, if it was in an Asian area, let us take call handling,
"You were slow arriving at us because we get a second-class
service because you are racist in terms of dealing with policing
issues". The same complaints were being made when we failed
to respond in a predominantly white area but the comment there
was, "You are late because you spend all your time in the
Asian area and we do not get the level of policing that we should
get". We have actually brought those groups together and
allowed them all to have a pop at us, and actually they all agreed
that they had got the same issues. There is an issue here about
how we deal with young people but it does not have a race connotation
with it. It has been evolutionary and has led to 230 or so kids,
in conjunction with our partners, coming to Hough End, which is
the police training school, and having a day which was serious.
It was talking about race issues, drugs, stop and search, their
rights when they are stopped by the police but we also placed
emphasis on responsibilities, and then we built in fun with it
as well. The idea was mixing people from communities who traditionally
do not mix because they do not go into each other's geographic
area. When they worked well as a team we built on that experience
by taking them out on some adventure days—whitewater rafting,
ballooning, that sort of thing, that allows young people in different
areas from different backgrounds to engage with each other as
the basis for some relationships to start to grow.
Q94 Chris Mole: Can I ask the Fire
Service about channels of communication? Which ones do you have
and do you find that your perceived neutrality helps?
Mr Taylor: Our perceived neutrality
is of enormous benefit. As far as communication channels are concerned,
we have a programme of daily contact with various voluntary groups
within the community centres where we operate a referral system
that targets those disengaged from mainstream education. We also
have a programme of school education including: "Learn Not
to Burn" and "Crucial Crew". We have also recently
instigated a process of street engagement utilising aspects of
Fire Service activity that brings us into closer contact with
the public but we had disengaged from. We now travel down streets,
the personnel get off the appliances, talk to the community, provide
fire safety messages but also deal with other issues such as vandalism,
car crime and such like, so on a daily basis the Fire Service
is in some way involved and communicating with customers.
Mr Griffiths: We also contribute
to the Crime and Disorder Panel with the police that David Baines
chairs.
Q95 Mr Clelland: Chief Superintendent
Baines, you have talked about community policing and the patch
responsibilities of some of your officers. How popular is this
in terms of building up trust and confidence with the police?
Is it working?
Mr Baines: The community love
it. The tension I have got is obviously in not having the consistent
presence of those officers at a time when I am trying to manage
demand. Ideally I would like to ring-fence them and not move them
away from their community beat areas, but if I am short of officers
because they are under training, on leave or on a rest day, sometimes
in order to fill the patrol vehicles to do a response I have to
bring them in and use them. The other tension I have in Oldham
is that the age profile of my officers is fairly young, so with
that there is extra training. I have fewer drivers and fewer tutor
constables, so therefore it tends to be the community beat officers
who have that driving experience, skill basis and tutor capability,
so they automatically become the only option I have got when I
am short of a driver or tutor.
Q96 Mr Clelland: So it is popular
amongst the community but not very popular amongst your officers?
Mr Baines: There are two styles
of officer. The community beat officers are volunteers in the
first instance. Their tension is that they get pulled away on
other priorities. Indeed, there was a public "Voice on Policing"
meeting where the community was saying, "We are fed up of
you taking our officers to go into the town centre", because
on a Friday and Saturday night it is sometimes a bit like the
Wild West and we need to put sufficient officers in there for
their own safety. There is a tension between pooling resources
and managing.
Q97 Mr Clelland: How do you see the
future panning out in terms of retaining talented officers in
the community?
Mr Baines: Two things have happened.
First of all, with the new Chief Constable, he has secured extra
funding that will give the force 800 extra officers, 53 of whom
are coming to Oldham. That will be a significant increase in the
level of resources and, once I have trained them up to driver
skills and past their initial training period, it will stop me
having to move community beat officers to fill the resource gaps
created. That is the first thing: 53 extra officers coming our
way. In addition, the local authority have funded public community
safety officers. We got 16 from the Home Office funding to start
with and they have gone down very successfully and have a second
tier patrol capability that fills the gap when we are going from
job to job. They have to step in as tension comes down after a
particular incident. We had 16 appointed to start with and in
the latest bid we got seven, but on top of that Oldham Borough
Council have agreed to fund 24 extra PCSOs to work in the various
townships across Oldham and that will give me greater visibility
of people with policing badges all over, accessible to police
radios, and they become extra eyes and ears, not only for criminals
but also as recipients of information and engaging with the communities.
Q98 Mr Clelland: So ideally how long
will the community beat officer be within that community? From
when he began until he retires or somewhere in between?
Mr Baines: It comes down to the
individual officer. You get some officers who will go in and they
will do two years, five years, in some cases they will do ten
or 15 years, but it is all down to their aspirations. If they
suddenly decide, "There is a new job starting and I want
to join the firearms unit", or, "I want to become a
detective", there is an issue about career progression, or
indeed if they seek promotion, because most of our community beat
officers are obviously at PC level. What we are trying to do is
create a sort of interim layer, that we have community beat sergeants,
and whilst they are taking on some of the respective responsive
role we would like to create a smaller geographic area for them
to be responsible for, and that is part of the township policing
model: a small team of officers responsible for a smaller community
rather than policing the whole of Oldham. It is about consistency,
it is about visibility and it is about accountability to the communities.
Q99 Chairman: Do you think they really
get enough status for the job they do?
Mr Baines: Probably no is the
answer.
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