Examination of Witness (Question Numbers
200-216)
DETECTIVE CHIEF
SUPERINTENDENT JOHN
CARNOCHAN
20 JANUARY 2009
Q200 Tom Brake: Clearly, at the moment
the interventions are not there?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
They are not there, no, absolutely not.
Q201 Tom Brake: Can I come on to
the Violence Reduction Unit? When it was set up in 2005 were there
precise targets that the unit was seeking to meet and, if there
were not, how do you measure whether you are being successful
or not?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
That was the first issue. We were told to think in a different
way. The Chief Constable at the time was Sir Willy Rae, and we
called him, because he said, "Just do it. If you think it
is the way to go, just do it." I think it is important that
we did not set off on a journey blindly, but we researched, we
had background, we had a general idea of where we were going.
So when we were asked if we had a map, no, we did not, but we
had a compass and that makes it much clearer for everyone to understand
the direction we were going in, because services are all set up
in different ways and if we start to get entangled sometimes KPIs
(key performance indicators) within different agencies actually
inhibit working together, because if that is what you need to
do and that is why you are there and that is what you have been
measured on, why would you do something else? So, actually, it
mitigates against good partnership working. For instance, the
classic example is we have offender services set up different
from the victim services. If two young men on an estate leave
the house tonight and they get into a fight, what decides who
the victim is and what decides who the offender is? It is who
is best, who the police catch or who they do not catch, and the
truth of the matter is, if we think, it is about the behaviour
that led to that moment because the outcome is a happenstance.
Some of the ways we measure. There are some quantitative ways.
How many people did we speak to in terms of attitudinal change?
We spoke to newspaper editors and, I think it was interesting,
just last week there was a headline in one of the Scottish papers
that said a young man had been found guilty and sentenced to 15
years for a murder involving a knife, but the headline actually
mentioned that this young man had been born to a drug addicted
mother in an abusive relationship. So newspapers are now starting
to put some context into it. That is not excusing the murder that
happened but rather trying to understand a relationship. If we
want to change these things it is about primary prevention, it
is about those early years. Otherwise, forget it, you will get
more corpses.
Q202 Tom Brake: Clearly, you have
achieved quite a significant reduction in crime. I think you mentioned
20%. Longer term, do you think that sort of reduction is achievable
or is it going to plateau out at some point?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
I actually want to increase the amount of violence that is reported
to us. I would like to see it going through the roof, because
right now only 50% of those who turn up at an A&E department
(and it is the same in England) will report it to the police,
so you are judging us on 30% knowledge, so whether it goes up
or down is an absolute irrelevance, it is a measure of activity,
because what will happen then, if you live in an area where there
is loads of violence and you see it outside your front window,
you will know someone who is in prison, you will know someone
who has been a victim, and the chief officer stands up, or a politician,
and says, "Relax; violence is going down", and you when
look out your front window you know that it is not; it is not
your experience. So two things: either that person is telling
lies or that person does not know. Either way, it is not good
for confidence and well-being in the community; so I would like
to see it actually go through the roof, and we do have surveillance
involved now in hospitals so they give more data for them so we
can get a better idea of the whole number.
Q203 Chairman: Can you tell me something
of the impact of alcohol on knife crime: the availability of alcohol,
especially to young people?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
I would say, first of all, I think, as I alluded to at the start,
that in relation to knife crime we do not use the word "crime"
at the Violence Reduction Unit. Violence is everything; it only
becomes a crime when it is reported to us. The second thing is
that alcohol affects all violence. In over 70% of murders alcohol
is involved, in over 70% of domestic abuse incidents alcohol is
involved; alcohol has been the elephant in the room. We have been
mesmerised by heroin and cocaine, and it is absolutely right that
we take due attention to that, but the truth of the matter is
that alcohol is the elephant in the room, and there is research
that is profound from all around the world. If you reduce access
to alcohol, you will reduce violence. Whether you reduce that
access by licensing laws, by price, by availability, by enforcement
of legislation, if you reduce it you will reduce violence, and
no mistake about it.
Q204 Mrs Dean: Can you tell us a
little about the work that you are doing in primary schools? What
is the scale of the prevention interventions that you are undertaking
and the cost implications of that?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
We have campus police officers, who are dedicated community officers
who work in schools. They start at the school, they finish at
the school, they work with the head teacher and there is a few
things that have happened around that. We have got about 50-odd
now in Scotland. We have used schools as a venue for education.
A good community officer will bump into young people, maybe 30
or 40, during his eight-hour shift, or her eight-hour shift, often
in conflict situations. In a school they will bump into the whole
school; they will be there; they are positive role models within
the school. We have found that attendance at the school improves,
bullying drops, school attendance, in fact, teacher attendance,
often improves, graffiti goes down. We find a way of dealing with
the drama before it becomes a crisis. Because relationships are
established, these officers are able to share information about
individual boys and girls in the school that otherwise they would
not. For instance, if a young girl's dad is arrested for knife
assault or domestic abuse on a Friday or Saturday night, if she
is not at school on the Monday, perhaps it is important that the
school are aware of that, perhaps it is important in terms of
truancy that they do joint visits. Those officers also link into
the feeder primary schools and the nursery schools so that at
that difficult time of transition when young people walk into
the big school, at least there will be one face that they know
and it will be that police officer. Currently MORI are doing an
evaluation for us of the schools, which will be out in March,
but some of the emerging issues from that are quite hopeful. The
arrangements we have locally, it is down to autonomous divisional
commanders, or BCU commanders. Normally it is shared 50:50—the
cost of a constable is 50:50—so it is maybe £25,000
for education per school, £25,000 for the police. It is a
good investment.
Q205 Mrs Dean: So that 50 are in
the high schools, are they?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
Yes.
Q206 Mrs Dean: And they work?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
They work with the feeder primary schools, they work with that
school community: because the high school will have feeder primary
schools (they work within that community) and also any nursery
schools that may be there, but in terms of primary prevention,
we actually need to be further upstream—not the police,
but we need to be further upstream. We need to, I would suggest,
build fewer universities and spend more on nursery teachers—not
national car parks for kids, but enrich good quality education.
Q207 Margaret Moran: In Luton we
are developing a toolkit for alcohol reduction, but the young
people are devising that themselves. How far are the young people
involved in devising any of your programmes?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
We work closely with Cathy Marshall, who is the Children's Commissioner
at Children 1st, Action for Children, and this year we have we
called it a youth engagement strategy. It is only an adult who
could think of a title like that, but what that is about is actually
listening to young people, linking in to the 32 local authorities
in Scotland and saying, "What are you asking your young people?
Can you give us the information that comes from that? Can we put
some questions onto that?" I think that is the absolute key,
because young people want to be safe, they want to be happy, they
want to be with their friends, they want something to do, rather,
I think, what we all want to do, and I think we need to recognise
that services for young people are as much a right as services
for babies, or services for adults, or whatever. We are not doing
enough of that and we need to do much more of it.
Q208 Bob Russell: I have been very
impressed with what I have read about the Violence Reduction Unit
and your evidence here today. Following on from colleagues, where
you have made reference to other agencies and the fact that the
police are getting involved at the lower end rather than waiting
until the consequences, could I just ask specifically in connection
with that: how is adopting a public health approach to violence
reduction improved, if it has improved, data sharing and partnership
working between the various authorities at all levels?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
First of all, adopting a public health approach applies a few
things to us. First, we need to understand the scale of the problem.
We then have a whole new lexicon of language. We start to think
about protection and risk, we start to think, not in years, but
in generations, and what we need to do. We think of primary prevention
and the effect and, when we start to use that language, that shared
agenda becomes inclusive for other partners because doctors can
understand what we are speaking about, teachers can understand
what we are speaking about. We are not speaking about crime and
offending and jail, we are speaking a common language. So that
is the first thing. We found our keenest allies, because at the
start we had a coalition of the willing because we were not mandated
to do anything and, as a police officer for 34 years, I actually
thought that people would do the right thing because it was the
right thing, but, anyway, that seemed to be a naive hope. A&E
consultants were the very first to walk towards the light because
they were passive receivers of the wounded and they understood.
They had little control over how they could break out of that
cycle, so they were very helpful. We went to Cardiff, where Professor
Jonathan Shepherd has done a fabulous job, and we actually stole
some of his ideas, and there is a survey form which asks ten questions
which clinicians fill in. It is anonymised. Where did it happen?
When did it happen? What age are you? Male or female? Was there
a weapon used? And other ones. We include sectarianism as a question—gangs,
and so on. That information is then matched with what we know
and we get a clearer picture of what is there.
Q209 Bob Russell: How widespread
is that A&E ten-point question form?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
In paper form it is in almost every A&E, it is certainly in
Strathclyde, but it is difficult with the paper form because we
still only get a return of maybe 60 or 70%. We have in Lanarkshire
a Health Board, which will be kicking off, I think, at the beginning
of next month, an electronic system where we actually merge the
data, and we have an analyst and the analyst will merge the data
and she will feed that information into the local police tackling
and co-ordinating unit.
Q210 Bob Russell: But that is still
voluntary. That is not a requirement, is it?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
We have that from the Chief Medical Officer in health. They are
born into that. That is not down to local doctors, this on the
system supported by the Government. This is proof of concept.
Once it works we will have it rolled out throughout Scotland,
and that will feed into the tasking and co-ordinating process.
Q211 Bob Russell: I was wondering
whether you could send us a copy of that form, because I am not
sure it is nationwide.
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
I can say that Jonathan Shepherd, the professor, was Chair of
the CDRP in Wales a number of years ago and by this method reduced
violence in Cardiff by, I think, 40%.
Chairman: If you could send that to the
committee, it would be extremely helpful.
Q212 Martin Salter: We want to probe
a little bit the meeting you held on 21 October at Glasgow Sheriff
Court, which appeared to follow on the very successful Boston
initiative for bringing gangs together, getting them face to face
with A&E consultants, members of the community and victims.
It is almost based, I think, on the kind of restorative justice
model but in a much wider format. How effective has that been?
Is there not a danger that, whilst on the one hand the figures
we have seen seem to indicate a significant drop in subsequent
instances of violence, you may entrench that gang's intensity
even further by almost institutionalising it as a result of adopting
that approach?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
First of all, in relation to the gangs, we have had the gangs
in Glasgow with the same names and the same territories for 30
or 40 years. It is already entrenched, so the "do no harm"
motion was easy to deal with. As to the Boston project, my deputy,
Karyn McClusky, came back having met David Kennedy at Harvard
who had started this, and said to me, "This is what you do.
You get young people who are involved in gangs and you tell them
to stop doing it because you have had enough and you offer them
something else to do."
Q213 Martin Salter: That is it?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
And basically that is it, but what we did is, through intelligence,
we identified all the gangs and every police force will have this
capability to identify the gangs, who is in them, where they fight,
what age, a whole range of things. We gathered that information—photographs,
everything. We then visited them and shut the doors and said,
"Listen, you want to be stopping doing this because the world
is about to change in the east end of Glasgow, so perhaps you
should come along to the Sheriff Court on 24 October." I
should say, I am really making it very short, because we spent
six months getting all the services together and selling the idea,
but we did, and there were some very willing partners in that.
At the Sheriff Court, we invited along 220 young men, 150-something
turned up, 95 in the morning who were under 16 or under 18 but
under supervision. We sat them in the public area of the court
and we had police officers there. On the other side of the court
we had about 80 professionals—teachers, social workers,
voluntary workers, community workers all in that end of the court.
The sheriff, the judge, came onto the bench and the court was
called into session and everybody stood up and they were there.
He welcomed them and then we gave them a series of inputs from
speakers, no longer than four minutes each. The Chief Constable
was first to speak, and when he spoke he walked amongst them and
he said, "We have had enough of this. The communities in
the east end of Glasgow have had enough of this", and while
he was speaking on screens we showed the photographs of the guys,
we showed the photographs of the connections and where they fought.
We told them, "We know where you are, we know where you live,
we know what you do, we know why you do it and we are coming to
get you. There are 8,000 of us and, if we need to be there every
night of the week for the next 12 months, we will be there. We
will be make your life very difficult." We spoke about opposing
a whole range of things. Then we had a group called Medics against
Violence, who are all consultants who go into schools and speak
about the damage that violence does, a newly formed group. They
spoke to them about the damage that knives in particular do, that
it takes an average 10 minutes for an ambulance to reach you but
you bleed to death in eight minutes, and some profound pictures
that went with that. I spoke to them about how difficult it must
be, from experience, living in an area where you do not know if
you are going to be chased when you leave the house at night,
when you cannot go and visit a girlfriend because she lives two
streets away and there is a gang there, how it inhibits what you
do, that we understood that. We had the local minister speaking
about burying young men. We had gang members speak. We had a mother
whose son had had a dreadful beating speaking about that. We had
voluntary groups where a young man who plays for the basketball
team from Chicago, who was a member of the Crips, and his brother
died there and he spoke—very powerful. We had two life-coaches,
who were ex-offenders, who were really the most telling, and one
of them said that he had met a man in prison that when he was
19 he tried to kill because he came from a different street and
they became friends in prison, and when he went to his mother's
funeral and he was standing at the side of the grave, it dawned
on him that in all his 28 years he had never bought his mother
a Mother's Day card. Young men link to their mums. That really
got to them. We finished with a guy called Jack Black who runs
an organisational called MindStore, which is a self-help motivation—a
big guy. If you want a two-day session with him it will cost you
£1,500. He came along for nothing because I knew him when
he was a social worker, so we called in a favour. He came along
and spoke to them and said, "You have all been given a card
with a phone number on it. I am going to ask you a question in
a minute." He said, "All these people here are here
because they care about you. If you do not care about yourself,
we do. We have had enough. We do not want this any more. You have
had enough. We want to tell you there is another way of doing
things, so I am going to ask you a question. Only the bravest
among you will stand up, because the other ones will not",
and he used some quite colourful language around that, and when
he said, "Right, stand up", first of all ten stood up
and then maybe 15, and then 20. Every one of them stood up except
three and, as they were standing up, the professionals started
to spontaneously applaud. In the afternoon we had 55 adults in.
They all stood up. We had six young men in from Polmont Prison
who were in the dock with prison officers. They would not leave
until they had been given a card with a phone number on it. They
have already been on the phone saying, "I get out in seven
months. Will this still be here?" It will be. Within the
first four weeks 70 contacted us, and they are now in programmes,
because what happens is they phone a free-phone number, it is
manned 24 hours a day, it is a no-wrong door. It might be about
education, it might be about readiness for work, it might be about
alcohol counselling, drug counselling, it might be housing, it
can be a whole range of things. We have also set up a football
tournament with 160 involved in it and yesterday morning my DCI,
who is the project manager, received a phone call from the sub-divisional
officer, who said, "I am just phoning you, Andy, to let you
know, I had no disturbance calls in Easter House over the weekend."
So we know it works. Everybody here knows it works. It is our
ability our ability to deliver it consistently that is the challenge.
It is our issue; it is not their issue.
Q214 Martin Salter: Thank you very
much. That was quite inspirational. A very simple question and
a quick answer, because I know the Chairman needs to move on.
Are you going to be doing more of this, should this be rolled
out across the UK nationally and should it form the basis of the
recommendation of this committee?
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
This is not a pilot, it is not an initiative, this is about changing
the way we do our business, so this is getting embedded. We are
not doing this and walking away. We have got funding committed
to this for two years and we have got other funding planned for
after that. It will roll out across Glasgow and it will pick out
(?) work, because not every city has gangs issues, but there will
be things that we find out about information sharing which are
really good that will help other people, so I think there will
be elements of it, and we have already done that. We have already
run a workshop just last week that Detective Chief Superintendent
Ball organised. So there will be things that others can judge
what is best to do from that, but we are not going away, it is
the right thing to do. We will not have the stats next year; we
will not have the stats in two years; it is the right thing to
do. There will be some indicators that we need to state.
Martin Salter: Many thanks.
Q215 Chairman: Detective Chief Superintendent,
I think we are all very impressed with what you have said to the
committee today. It sounds extremely practical, which is what
we are looking for in respect of this report. Now that Mr Hitchcock
has given up his job maybe you should apply.
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
No, I am sorry—34 years—Scotland is difficult enough.
Q216 Chairman: If you could send
us that written information that Mr Russell asked for, that would
be very helpful, and it may well be that some members of the committee
may come and visit your project in Scotland to see what you are
doing there. If you hold another day such as the one you described,
we would like to come along.
Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan:
The 20 February is the next one. We have other ones, regular ones.
Chairman: We are very impressed. Thank
you very much.
|
