Examination of Witness (Questions 440-451)
27 JANUARY 2004
MR MATTHEW
BAGGOTT
Q440 Christine Russell: Obviously, you
have the lead in ACPO for the social cohesion agenda. What are
you doing to spread good practice throughout all the 43 forces
in the land?
Mr Baggott: The critical thing
for me has been four to five years of evidence learning. I think
often we take philosophies and apply them and when they do not
deliver it becomes rather difficult. What we have now is five
years, through the social exclusion work with which I have been
involved, through the priority policing area work, which is led
by the Home Office, these are intensive policing neighbourhoods,
and through a four-year evaluation in the West Midlands, and elsewhere,
we can evidence now the effect of mapping properly where there
are different crime densities, where offenders live, where there
is community breakdown, and then you see the areas which are really
suffering or exporting crime. What we have now is four to five
years of real evidence of what actually worked, which we have
not had before, and I think that is where the critical difference
will be made. I see the work coming together this year through
the new National Centre for Policing Excellence, where we have
a team working with nine forces developing this new way of geographic
policing, which I think in time will be vastly different from
what we have seen before but much more powerful, in terms of its
impact.
Q441 Mr Clelland: Would you outline for
the Committee your concerns about the existing partnership arrangements
and the changes you would like to see?
Mr Baggott: I think there are
two sets of partnerships at the moment. One is the Crime and Disorder
Partnership, which is very localised, driven very much by three-year,
bottom-up plans, heavy in terms of community consultation, but,
to some degree, somewhat restricted by that. For example, if you
look at one neighbourhood, they are not going to vote for resource
to go into another neighbourhood, so they are somewhat restricted
by the way in which the plans are put together. Having said that,
they do have, and can have, a great impact at the very local level,
but above that there is a need for a Strategic Partnership, which
I think looks at things which the Crime and Disorder Partnership
cannot do on their own. For example, in Leicestershire, I have
brought the seven together and we meet strategically. What I am
asking them to do is give up some resource at a higher level to
do things like where are our priority neighbourhoods across Leicestershire,
where are the dozen geographic areas which, if we get right, will
bring enormous benefit in terms of resource cost, sorting out
crime and a whole range of issues? We cannot do that at the local
level. The second issue is, if you look at some of the main disrupting
factors in neighbourhoods, some of that, for example, involves
people coming out of prison. At the moment, people coming out
of prison are tracked and supervised only if they have served
a fairly substantial sentence. The vast majority come out and
within weeks will be back into a crime cycle. What we are trying
to do is design a system where everybody in Leicestershire is
mapped, met on the day they come out of prison by a local police
officer, given a package of support, Benefits Agency, primary
care, local Jobcentre, all mapped out at the local level but done
to a standard which applies across Leicestershire itself. I cannot
do that seven ways with seven Crime and Disorder Partnerships.
Another issue might be the way that I use my powers to accredit
community support officers and others to deliver real benefit,
again in neighbourhoods. Again, I cannot negotiate that seven
ways, there needs to be consistency. A fourth area might be young
people. There are lots of great interventions for young people,
but I have 500 persistent offenders in Leicestershire alone, that
is actually 500 young people who have grown up to be 500 persistent
offenders. If we can put better support for those 500 in place
when they are four, five or six years old then we might reap some
significant benefit in ten years' time. Again, Crime and Disorder
Partnerships are far too small to do that and far too localised,
so we need a partnership above that which looks at the really
critical interventions. I had hoped to have some potential for
Local Strategic Partnerships with the ODPM to do that. I do not
think their remit has been clear enough around their need to tackle
criminality and reassurance issues in the longer term. I think
at the moment they are too economically focused and the policing
element of that and the social cohesion element get a little bit
lost, I think. There may be some work to do with Local Strategic
Partnerships, there may be some work to do around redesigning
what a Strategic Partnership might look like, and I see some great
potential for that.
Q442 Chris Mole: I think you will be
familiar with the term patch policing, and you have described
to us the work which you have done in Birmingham and Leicestershire.
Do we need you to go everywhere to make this happen in all forces,
or is it happening elsewhere?
Mr Baggott: I think most forces
have some degree of what I would call neighbourhood or patch policing.
Undoubtedly, most forces you go to will have something like it.
It could be sector policing, geographic policing, they have different
names depending on the model that they use. I think the makings
are there. I think what has happened though is that the reactive
demands on policing have grown so much that we have become too
crisis-driven and inflexible, and we need to be thinking about
new ways of deploying. To give you an example, Melton, for example,
is a rural community in Leicestershire. You would say traditional
policing might work well in Melton, except that it has eight beats,
and 70% of the problems come from just one beat. Traditional policing
would have eight beat officers on each of those eight beats. It
might be only 20 police officers on one beat and one covering
the other seven. That is, I think, the flexible thinking where
we go with patch policing. I am a great, passionate believer that
all communities, all neighbourhoods, should have locally-named
police officers with whom they could have a relationship. I call
it "whites of your eyes" policing, Dixon with attitude,
these sorts of things, but it is about providing somebody who
has the tools and the confidence to do something special. What
I am arguing is that I do not think one PC working on a North
Peckham estate will have any impact, you might need 30 or 40.
It is the tight lines we draw on the map which need to be challenged,
I think, rather than the style of policing.
Q443 Chris Mole: You are fairly confident
that this sort of approach is happening generally. The Government
do not need to do anything more to encourage you to cross the
country?
Mr Baggott: I think there is a
developing understanding that we have to look much more at vulnerability
and reassurance and be much more businesslike in understanding
where problems are coming from, rather than relying on traditional
theory. I do think that the Police Reform Act has introduced codes
of practice, guidance, with a much tighter sense of prescription
to it, and if that guidance is right, and we are working on that
this year, then I can see far greater consistency coming in terms
of the way policing is carried out. I think the National Centre
for Policing Excellence and reform programme have introduced a
mechanism to do that. The challenge will be getting the guidance
right and actually understood as a way of delivering real change.
Q444 Chris Mole: Coming back then to
the `whites of their eyes' policing, two points. One, do not talented
police officers want to move on to do perhaps more exciting things
than community policing, they want to get into detective work,
or traffic work, or whatever? I do not know. Is there not an issue
for you there in retaining people who are actually doing the patch
work?
Mr Baggott: I think there is,
and I think probably there is one key thing we can do, and are
doing, to try to challenge that. One is actual local leadership.
I think many police officers, when they experience patch policing
in its truest form, when they actually have the ability not just
to set up Neighbourhood Watches and talk to people but, how can
I put it, kick the doors in on drug-dealers, lead things on behalf
of communities, actually be crime-fighters, who are true guardians
of the community, I have seen tremendous sign-up for that role.
We put people in roles and then restrict what they can do, and
that is a great challenge. In Leicestershire, just to give you
an example, I have taken the opportunity, or made the opportunity,
to bring our own probationer training back in house. I want our
police officers in Leicestershire trained, first of all, in being
at the heart of communities, as guardians, listening, relationship-building,
problem-solving, these are the critical skills which will be core
to the role, not filling in forms and the power of arrest but
actually what they were there for in the first place. If you get
that role right, from day one, with some very distinctive psychological
weapons, done by any person in the community who looks at this,
if you get the role right and the leadership right then actually
the sign-up for this becomes significantly more.
Q445 Chris Mole: Has there not been a
tendency in the past for the Police Service perhaps not to want
people to be in one place for too long, because they get too close
to the community and perhaps cannot see where the lines are sometimes?
Mr Baggott: I think there are
some dangers attached to that, but I do believe that we have an
accountability now which is far stronger, and I do not think that
is such a problem as it was in the past.
Q446 Mr Cummings: If the police are to
have regular and effective contact with all members of local communities,
will it not have to tailor its approaches to the particular cultural
expectations of the different groups, recognising that it will
require greater acceptance and greater respect for their cultural
practices? Can you tell the Committee how far you see this is
practical and how it can be achieved?
Mr Baggott: I do not believe it
is achieved by two-day training courses.
Q447 Chairman: The cynic in you says
"Make it three days"?
Mr Baggott: Or maybe a year. I
think this starts from the very day someone joins the Police Service.
Actually, again, what we are training people in is respect and
relationship-building. The traditional approaches to race relations
training have been very much classroom-driven, with people saying,
"This is what this faith believes in, this is what this religion
does." I think it is much better to have a philosophy of
policing where actually you ask people. When you own a patch,
for example, with a mosque, to go into the mosque and say, "I
don't really understand your faith. I don't want to offend anybody
but I want to be here to support you. Can you talk me through
how I can do that?" There are very different sets of training
and skills than being given a lecture in a classroom about the
Muslim faith. I think the critical thing for us is to encourage
skills that are about listening and asking, rather than being
told what to do. I think that starts very much from day one in
the training school and continues with someone's progression.
Q448 Mr Cummings: Having said that, do
you have any plans for the police to employ more women officers
to relate to Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women?
Mr Baggott: I think one of the
big gaps that we have at the moment, in terms of recruitment,
certainly this year, 19% of my colleagues are female and about
five% of my colleagues are from ethnic minority backgrounds. We
have a big challenge ahead, particularly to recruit ladies of
talent from different backgrounds. At the moment, there is some
very innovative work being done, under the Dismantling Boroughs
campaign, led by the Home Office. Actually, in my force, I launched
this yesterday, it is my own colleagues, my own female, black
colleagues, who put themselves forward to appear on billboards,
they are at the end of telephones, answering calls from people
wanting to join the Service. I think the great ambassadors for
this will come from within the Service rather than from outside.
That is going to be the great progress that we make in the next
couple of years.
Q449 Mr Cummings: What is your opinion
of the development of arrangements whereby local representatives
and opinion-formers would help the police to relate to minority
communities, as proposed in the Ted Cantle report?
Mr Baggott: I think there is a
great need for what I would say is formal consultative structures,
which exist almost as safety valves and they are always there,
so you can have people coming to those consultative groups, other
mechanisms, neighbourhood committees, whatever they want, I think
that is absolutely right. Underneath that, I think we have to
be much more flexible about how we listen to people, and I will
give you an example. When I was running Peckham, in South London,
I was told that I did not have a Nigerian community, because they
were invisible, except that, very rapidly, through a local church,
I found myself being invited to meetings at nine o'clock at night,
in a disused fire-station, with 500 Nigerian people. Where did
they come from? They were always there. The fact is we need much
more flexible ways of listening and consulting and being much
more proactive. That is why I am so much in favour of every police
officer owning their own beat, even if they cannot be there all
the time, because you cannot do it except by having people and
structures actually to invite people to speak to you.
Q450 Christine Russell: Can we move on
to drugs. A number of your colleagues have often said, "If
we could tackle the drug problem we would halve the country's
crime statistics." In your experience, how much does drug-dealing,
perhaps, rather than drug-taking, drug-dealing, contribute to
poor social cohesion?
Mr Baggott: Significantly, I think
is the very short answer to that, and that is why I am particularly
anxious that in the social cohesion work and the National Policing
Plan we do not deal with it just as a race issue. It is very much
an issue of why communities fragment. Last autumn we saw the fulfilment
of a number of long-term undercover operations on some of our
inner-city estates in Leicestershire. When we arrested the drug-dealers,
and we have doubled our arrests in the last year for drug supply,
people were on the street cheering, literally. The impact of particularly
Class A drugs sales on inner-city estates is quite significant.
The greatest challenge I have in Leicester at the moment is a
doubling of the entertainments industry in the city, which has
fuelled a drug market which is being exploited on inner-city estates
by people who are normally excluded from normal life opportunity.
When you combine that with a significant rise in the heroin price,
because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have a profit
margin, organised crime capacity and a ready-made market. It is
a significant influence on inner-city estates. That is why I think
the agenda in terms of social cohesion needs to take into account
the whole issue of inter-ethnic conflict and race, but it is a
much more complex issue which needs the mapping out of where crime
densities, problems, actually are coming from. It is much more
complicated than that.
Q451 Christine Russell: Does ACPO, as
such, have any specific advice, I suppose, that it gives to forces
regarding tackling drug-dealing in areas with a high percentage
of people who are either black or from ethnic minority communities?
Mr Baggott: I would not say any,
in terms of tackling drugs specifically; drugs in the context
of inner-city communities, yes. There has been an awful lot of
learning, for example, through the Priority Policing Area Initiative
in the last two years, which has shown that it is no use simply
having dedicated neighbourhood teams of police officers if your
drug supply route comes from Gatwick. You have to be able to draw
down and deal with the supply route into that neighbourhood as
well as the neighbourhood itself. It is very compelling. In fact,
I may have mentioned in the submission, the work on our inner-city
estates in Leicester last year has relied heavily on a regional
arrangement, where we brought in specialist officers to work with
those neighbourhood teams for a prolonged period of time tackling
the drug networks. I think this comes back to the whole essence
of community policing. If you have a view of community policing
that is based simply on their beat bobby, it is always doomed
to failure. If you have a notion of community policing which is
putting trusted and respected officers, in the right numbers,
in the right place, backed up by sophisticated policing methods
and specialists, if needed, then you can start changing the hearts
of communities. What historically both Government and policing
have done is say, "Community policing is over there. CID
policing is over there. Regeneration is over here." In fact,
what we need to be saying is "Where is the neighbourhood?
What are the problems? Let's look at how we need to resolve those."
Chairman: On that note, can I thank you
very much indeed for your evidence. You have given us a lot to
think about. Thank you.
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