Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
228-260)
SIR NORMAN
BETTISON QPM, MR
JONATHAN CHARLTON
AND COUNCILLOR
PAUL MURPHY
11 JANUARY 2010
Q228 Chair: We are squeezing you
down slightly but we were getting into a very interesting line
of questioning there and I think it probably suggests to you the
lines we are going to want to be pursuing with you particularly.
Can I start off really with asking if you could clarify from the
point of view of the police firstly whether you think you are
in charge or local authorities are in charge of the Prevent
programme in each locality and, secondly, whether you think there
is a tension between the police view of what Prevent should
be doing, which may be the Government's view but we will leave
that to one side, and local authorities' views of what Prevent
is trying to achieve?
Sir Norman Bettison: I am Sir
Norman Bettison, the Chair of the Association of Chief Police
Officers and Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. I am very
clear that if Prevent were left to the police it would
fail.
Q229 Chair: Could you explain why?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes, because
the police have got to undertake the full gamut of the four Ps—Protect,
Prepare and Pursue as well as Prevent. There is always the potential
for those different responsibilities to be confused and misunderstood.
The police have a reach into a community at a particular level.
Wherever you get good neighbourhood policing that reach is greater.
Wherever you get safer schools partnerships the reach is greater
still but the reach can only go so far. At a local authority level
through schools, through youth outreach, through community health,
there is the opportunity for a much greater reach into the wider
realms of the community. The police, relatively speaking, have
this superficial reach and the other responsibilities that have
to be undertaken in the police role, so if Prevent is left
to the police it will be less effective and less optimal than
if the local authority is very centrally involved. In my view,
the local authorities is the appropriate agency to lead on Prevent.
Q230 Chair: And the other two on
that point. If you agree just say you agree but if you have different
points.
Councillor Murphy: I agree so
I will not protract it.
Mr Charlton: Can I just add very
briefly I think the notion of leadership is a moot point to some
extent. It is about getting the arrangements in place that are
right and work for all local partnerships and they differ from
location to location. On the issue of police and local authority
relationships, yes, I think there are tensions sometimes. I think
certainly in the early days of Prevent two to three years
ago there were very real tensions between what was seen as a community
cohesion response, as you have discussed earlier and a security-based
response, and I think certainly over the last three years we have
matured and gone some way to developing partnerships that have
resolved some of those differences.
Councillor Murphy: If I may just
add to that. It is quite variable. It should not be taken that
there is a consistency across the piece of police authorities
and forces and those partnerships on Prevent. It is quite
variable. There are areas that I think are exemplars of good practice
and there are other areas where they do not think it affects them,
which is always a cause of concern for us in the APA and of course
in the forces.
Q231 Chair: I would quite like to
pursue the points we were making at the end of the last session
while they are still fresh in our minds because it is important
to pursue it with you particularly I think in relation to the
Channel project. The point that John Pugh was pursuing
about where is the move within a democracy between the right to
express radical views and the Channel programme, which
in a sense is using the expression, amongst other things, of radical
views as a trigger to then target those individuals with measures
that prevent them from turning to violence—or allegedly
prevent them turning to violence, particularly young people.
Sir Norman Bettison: Can I start
with a story about Hasib Hussain. Hasib Hussain was a young man,
a third generation Leeds-born individual. He went through the
school system. He was the son of a foundry worker. His three siblings
have done very well. Hussain was doing a business diploma course
at a local college. He was a model student at Matthew Murray School
in East Leeds. He went on at the age of 18 to strap a rucksack
to his back and blew up the number 30 bus that we have all seen
in the scenes that followed the 07/07 bombings. We started to
unpick what was known about Hasib Hussain. He had never come to
the notice of the police at any stage in his young life and therefore
in terms of opportunities for the police to intervene to prevent
what went on to occur, there were just no hooks there. However,
what we did discover is that as a model student whilst at Matthew
Murray School his exercise books were littered with references
to Al-Qaeda, and the comments could not have been taken as other
than supportive comments about Al-Qaeda. To write in one's exercise
book is not criminal and would not come on the radar of the police,
but the whole ethos, the heart of Prevent is the question
for me of whether someone in society might have thought it appropriate
to intervene. What do I mean by intervention? I do not mean kicking
his door down at 6 o'clock in the morning and hauling him before
the magistrates. I mean should someone have challenged that? They
are the sorts of cases that get referred through the Channel
scheme. It is not a question of having a scheme and targeting
it on individuals but having a scheme that is capable that has
the facility to actually provide intervention opportunities that
might be a precursor or it might be some way up-stream from somebody's
ideas and attitudes developing into violent extremism.
Q232 Dr Pugh: At what point is that
done? A lot of young men have quite radical opinions of one kind
or another. It is about the only time in one's life when one does
have radical opinions. Here you have a clear-cut case where somebody
is advocating support for a known terrorist organisation which
would give anybody outright cause for concern. Suppose that views
were expressed about the Palestinian situation quite forcefully,
would that also count? What would the threshold be and who would
be the judge of where it was done appropriately and where it was
done inappropriately?
Sir Norman Bettison: This is an
incredibly moot point. I think it is a very case-by-case sensitive
point. The important thing is that it is not law enforcement interventions
so the interventions that are anticipated through the Channel
scheme or through having a Prevent focus is that somebody
feels that it is appropriate to challenge or to question or to
mentor or to coach. All the interventions that have come through
the 228 publicly stated cases of Channel intervention have
been handled through that sort of mentorship or challenge and
not through law enforcement.
Q233 Dr Pugh: Following that through,
there is a lot of race hatred crime within the UK. Certainly as
a former teacher I have observed both in written and other communications
by pupils in schools some sentiments which are quite disturbing
a propos racial issues. Would it be appropriate to subject
them to the same parallel kind of process?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.
Q234 Dr Pugh: It would not be preventing
terrorism in this case but it would be preventing crime.
Sir Norman Bettison: What we have
found with Prevent is that it is a useful model for addressing
all sorts of violent attitudes; so violent in a broad construct
of the term not necessarily physical confrontation but where people
have violent attitudes the Prevent scheme in general and
the Channel scheme in particular has been used to intervene
with people who have expressed racist views and who have expressed
views of wanting to kill who are not Muslims, and they are people
that have come on to the radar because we have tried and tested
and practised these interventions in the past.
Q235 Dr Pugh: What you are advocating
is a more general link between the police system and the education
system?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes I am.
It is called safeguarding. We are tied by government policy and
by legislation. We all have a responsibility to safeguard young
people under the age of 21.
Q236 Alison Seabeck: You were sitting
at the back and you will have heard concerns expressed by some
of the witnesses that targeting purely the Muslim community was
not necessarily very constructive.
Sir Norman Bettison: I agree.
Q237 Alison Seabeck: It would therefore
make sense to take this out of this particular programme and apply
it in a different way and that would ultimately have the same
net result in terms of dealing with radicalisation or trying to
identify radicalisation without it necessarily stigmatising one
particular community.
Sir Norman Bettison: One of the
best things that has come out of the work on Prevent is
the joint funding into police and schools extending the reach
of safer schools partnerships. Those safer schools partnerships
are capable of focusing across the whole gamut of communities,
of race, of faith, and of problems faced by those communities,
but it has brought us together. We should not ignore the fact
that the most significant threat to this country from terrorist
activity is from Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism.
Q238 Alison Seabeck: At the moment.
Sir Norman Bettison: What we are
dealing with when we look at our communities in the broad scope
of race and faith and colour and ethnicity, what we actually see
are vulnerabilities and it seems to me to be a fact that the young
people who will be most vulnerable from Al-Qaeda-inspired rhetoric
and inspiration are young Muslims, so it makes sense, in my view,
not as a policeman but as an observer of society, to focus some
activity if we are intent on stopping the Al-Qaeda-inspired rhetoric
from landing and becoming embedded that we target our activity
and our focus in the Muslim community.
Q239 Alison Seabeck: Would you not
also accept that there is a risk of alienating young people by
simply just focusing on that?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.
Q240 Alison Seabeck: Which is why
it was interesting to hear Leicester's experience in the earlier
session that they decided to broaden it out.
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.
Q241 Mr Betts: Can I follow that
up. You are saying people other than Muslims had been referred
through the Channel project. Do you know roughly what the
breakdown was in the 228 cases? How many of these people were
Muslim?
Sir Norman Bettison: The overwhelming
majority have been young Muslim males. A minority, off the top
of my head somewhere between ten and 20, have been non-Muslims.
Q242 Mr Betts: Any women?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes, there
have been a handful of women but the overwhelming majority is
young men under the age of 25 from Muslim communities.
Q243 Mr Betts: Given that the people
who are closest in a whole variety of ways to young men who may
be developing extremist views or thoughts or potential actions
are likely to be closer to them in their community rather than
to authority, how do you build up confidence so that people feel
that it is the right thing to do to pass on information through
the Channel project rather than being seen as what I suppose
in the old colloquial phrase is "snitching" on their
mates or the people they work with?
Sir Norman Bettison: For me the
parallel, and it has all sorts of echoes with the early days which
I sadly remember of dealing with other risks and harms such as
drugs, what there was always when the police were first engaged
on drugs enforcement was the tension between wanting to protect
the vulnerable young people from the menace of addictive drugs
and asking people within the community to, in a sense, report
those who were experimenting or becoming seduced by drugs. The
maturity of the relationship that we have with other partners
now is such that actually the police are involved with treatment
and education just as much as we are involved with enforcement,
and it is because people have been able to see over the years
that information or concern expressed to a third party can often
be of benefit to young people in protecting them from a menace
such as drug or other risks that particularly befall young people.
This is a pretty new agenda but I am very optimistic that as long
as we are sensitive, as long as it is not just a police initiative
but one shared by other agencies within the community, I genuinely
believe that it will become more and more trusted.
Q244 Dr Pugh: In terms of who reports
the person with violent extremist tendencies—I think you
said 228 cases—are the bulk of them reported by their own
community or picked up via third party organisations?
Sir Norman Bettison: A real spread.
I would not like to say majority/minority in one particular direction
but it includes schools, it includes teachers, it includes the
community themselves. In cases that I am aware of it includes
parents who have raised concerns about the direction of travel
that their son's attention and friendships and attitudes have
drifted into.
Q245 Chair: Would you be able to
provide us with the numbers afterwards? Is it recorded?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.
Chair: Because I think we would find
very useful the actual breakdown of what sort of grouping has
returned them.
Q246 Mr Betts: There have been some
concerns expressed to us in a general sense about the Prevent
agenda that it is a mixture of things that ought to get the community
on side, community initiatives trying to engage people in a positive
way, and at the other end of course some harder edge approaches
to dealing with people who might be moving into extremism. Sometimes
there has been a confusion over that and sometimes because of
the links between the various elements of the project there has
been a stigma attached to the whole project, "This is just
an anti-Muslim agenda because we get community improvements of
facilities because we are perceived to be a threat to the wider
nation". In the police do you have that same concern, particularly
that you have got the friendly neighbourhood bobby being engaged
and linking with the community and on the other hand you have
counter-terrorism officers clearly having a role to play as well?
Sir Norman Bettison: I would like
to leave the Committee with a diagram if I may. I thought we might
get into that so I have brought along a diagram and the diagram
basically shows three interlocking circles. At the centre is neighbourhood
policing. It inter-locks at one end with local authorities and
other partners and it interlocks at the other end with the Counter-Terrorism
Unit. I do not have any concern or worry that it is this sort
of Janus-like operation that has to look both ways. As a Police
Service that is built and is founded upon neighbourhood policing,
we have to have local partnerships and local arrangements to help
to support, to intervene, but because of who we are, we also have
to have an overlay with our counter-terrorism colleagues and our
national security colleagues in the security service and other
agencies. For example where we came by information that suggested
that someone was actively pursuing the idea of violence then that
information could be shared with the Counter-Terrorism Unit.
Q247 Mr Betts: Just as an example,
we were having an informal discussion earlier on and we were trying
to talk about the best way to try and engage through Prevent
(or whatever you call programmes) with people in the Muslim
community. One example was given of police engagement where within
a matter of a few minutes of it beginning it became obvious that
the officer involved was a counter-terrorism officer and that
really destroyed the rest of any meaningful engagement because
there was a suspicion immediately that "we are perceived
to be the bad guys; we have been criminalised from the beginning
of this conversation". Would you be happy about that approach?
Do you see that counter-terrorism officers have a different role
to the front-line of police engagement with the community through
the Prevent agenda?
Sir Norman Bettison: We have in
my police force area brought counter-terrorism officers into the
community in order that they can explain what they do, but what
they do is different to what the neighbourhood officer, John Smith
and Jenny Brown, sees day in and day out as the community goes
about its daily business. So there is a distinction but I have
an honest and strongly held belief that the more open and transparent
we are about what goes on in that spectrum, the Venn diagram that
I have circulated, the better we will be positioned in terms of
community understanding.
Councillor Murphy: Just to continue
that, I hope what I am about to say informs you, Mr Betts. You
have probably heard of the desktop Operation Nicole, and I do
not know if you are aware of the details or not. We have run that
in Greater Manchester for example for elected members throughout
the whole of Greater Manchester. What that does in effect is reverses
the role, if you like, where we accept and understand the concerns
of the Muslim communities that we appear to be targeting them.
When one reverses the role and says you take the decision that
in fact the counter-terrorist police would have to take it really
does begin to take on a different hue. It is a two-day process
in this case. I personally found it very, very illuminating and
I think members of my Muslim community and close friends of mine
within Manchester City Council also found it interesting. What
I also wanted to say is that the ACC responsible for counter-terrorism
in Greater Manchester, it is the point that Norman has just made,
was accountable at that meeting and answered the questions. I
am driven by the concept of the need to inform rather than a need
to know and that is generally the view of the APA. We have to
start talking to people to explain to people why we do this. I
agree with Dr Pugh that being radical is not an offence. If you
are not radical when you are young you will never be radical.
The step to violent extremism is the real issue. My submission
would be, and we support as an APA absolutely, the neighbourhood
policing model. I think the answer to some of the questions you
ask is that where trust is built (and it takes time to do that)
within those communities, with neighbourhood policing, then I
believe that you can begin to build that trust that exists. The
English Defence League, for example, is an organisation where
wherever it appears there is violence. In Greater Manchester in
partnership with all of our communities we attempted to ask the
Home Secretary to ban a march. He did not. We asked on the basis
that we knew there would be violence. Our biggest concern was
that young Muslims would turn up to that march because these people
are clearly anti-Muslim, an odious bunch, quite frankly. What
we were able to do because of that neighbourhood partnership working
that Norman has just alluded to is go out to our communities to
speak to the imams, particularly in the Cheetham Hill Road area
of Manchester, and speak to them and explain that the police had
this under control. The Muslim community representatives, who
were the elected members, were involved every step of the way
in the Gold command process. As a result of that there was no
violence. There were a number of arrests from the extreme right
wing. There were maybe two arrests from the Muslim community.
That gives you some idea of what neighbourhood policing in its
better format contains.
Q248 Dr Pugh: Could I ask specifically
about neighbourhood policing. I agree it is absolutely critical
because obviously policing must be done sensitively in this case
so that people do not get picked on because they have suddenly
grown a beard or something like that. Clearly it takes time, given
the makeup of the police force, to feel completely comfortable
and au fait when policing a largely Muslim neighbourhood, as certainly
would be the case in some parts certainly of Lancashire. Has there
been any study made of the length of time and/or training that
neighbourhood police have who are active in largely Muslim neighbourhoods?
I am aware of the fact that neighbourhood policing is a great
thing but due to career development amongst the police neighbourhood
policemen move around sometimes rather a lot and visit a lot of
neighbourhoods and you really want a degree of real understanding
here.
Councillor Murphy: I will give
another example about Greater Manchester if I may. We are trying
to settle people into those communities—and I believe it
is the same in West Yorkshire.—where neighbourhood policing
now becomes the area in which people need to be if they are going
to be promoted at all. The second thing is that the Chief Constable
has communicated through the police authority that we would want
to keep people in those communities much longer than we have previously
done and we have set that as an agenda item and that is beginning
to work. You are quite right. I do not know the answer about how
long it takes. What I can say is that you will be aware that Greater
Manchester Police have been involved in a number of exercises
around the counter-terrorism area. Some have done very well and
some I have probably been the worst critic o, if you like, which
you would expect me to be. We hold the police to account and it
is quite right that we do that, but, in the main, the direction
of travel, if you forgive that awful cliché, is that people
are beginning to trust the work that is going on because of neighbourhood
policing. The final part of that is a question that you asked
earlier which was a really good question from Mr Betts and that
is how do we know what success looks like. There is a bigger question
about the whole of the agenda of counter-terrorism, which is how
do we know when we are winning? We are spending an awful lot of
money on it.
Q249 Chair: Can I go back to the
Channel programme and an issue that Sir Norman raised that
it has to be done sensitively. Some of the anecdotes that we were
given again in the session beforehand suggested that an Achilles
heel of Channel may be the people not within the police
necessarily but within schools or whatever, who are identifying
the individuals who they believe may be at risk. There was an
example given of two girls one discussing with the other why she
should be wearing the hijab. I can see absolutely that drawing
all over a book saying Al-Qaeda is good idea is at a completely
different end of things, but that is an example, after all, where
we all know that that individual did move on to violence. There
is this difficulty, it seems to me, from an evidence point of
view in the Channel programme that, by the nature of things,
you cannot provide any evidence that it works. You cannot be sure
that an individual who was identified as being directed to the
Channel programme, you cannot say, as one of our local
authority witnesses slipped up and said, you cannot be sure that
that person would have committed violence, and therefore if at
the end of the Channel programme they do not, you cannot
say that that is success because it is not measurable. Is there
an issue about the trigger point for identifying individuals?
Who is exercising that? Is it teachers, head teachers, college
lecturers across the piece, or is it a bit more rigid than that
and is it the police who are saying whether that is enough or
not?
Sir Norman Bettison: The place
to which an individual is referred is a multi-agency panel. It
is not a particular individual. So there is a multi-agency panel
that considers the questions of referral. Some of those 228 referrals
are simply "we will maintain a watching brief on that"
and, in a sense, the concern dissipates. I think it depends on
whether you see the interventions, whatever is contained under
the description of that, as intrusive and for the benefit of society
or whether you actually see them as supportive and for the benefit
of the individual.
Q250 Chair: It is not a matter of
whether we see them as that. It is a matter of whether the public
and in particular those parts of the public that seem to be being
targeted perceive them as targeting?
Sir Norman Bettison: In fairness,
I think what is most important is the person that has that intervention.
When I address it in terms of coaching, mentoring, challenging,
supporting, actually you can begin to see that that is not necessarily
a negative experience for the young man, the individual that is
subject to that intervention. I think that good teachers have
been doing this all my life. What they have been doing is noticing
that there are issues of concern and doing something about it.
That for me is on all fours with good Prevent interventions.
Mr Charlton: In some respects
this is nothing new. Police and other partners have been operating
interventions through referral processes for a decade or more,
around drugs, around anti-social behaviour, around youth offending.
There are a lot of different perspectives on Prevent and
one of the really interesting ones that I heard about on Channel
is that there is almost a moral imperative to work with young
people in this way. If it prevents somebody from ruining their
own life and the lives of many others there is a real moral imperative
behind that to work with these young people. Just one final thing
on Channel, I sit as a member of the national steering
group and have done for the last year and it has matured significantly
in that time, and the development of relationships between different
partners—Children's Services, the Probation Service, police—is
very, very well developed now. There are some very healthy debates
within that steering group that border on argument at times. A
lot of that is predicated on the basis of Channel must
start from the basis of protecting young people, addressing vulnerability
and ensuring that safeguarding concerns are taken care of.
Q251 Chair: But you are not getting
that message across because for example the UCU in universities
have objected strenuously to the notion that they should be checking
what their students are doing and then reporting them to the police.
It is not just the Muslim community which is suspicious and feels
they are all being put under surveillance. There are quite large
sections of the rest of society that are suspicious about this
programme and that do not accept it.
Sir Norman Bettison: The police
have never asked the universities to monitor and report.
Q252 Chair: Do you think it is a
good idea or not?
Sir Norman Bettison: There was
an interesting article in the Sunday Times yesterday that
suggested that actually good guardianship, not guardianship on
behalf of society but guardianship of one's students, means knowing
what is happening on the university campus. If that raises concerns
that need to be taken off the university campus then there are
lots of agencies that can be referred to.
Q253 Dr Pugh: Would you accept that
it is an extraordinarily tricky job and a very, very difficult
and onerous job to pick out who is likely to be a future terrorist
even from a group of people passed on and referred to you? What
is not an equivocal matter or difficult matter or ambiguous matter
is identifying people who are actually setting up terrorist networks,
providing training, providing explosives and so on because none
of these people identified as potential terrorists will ever become
a genuine terrorist without the wherewithal and the backing they
will get from an organised terrorist organisation, or very rarely
would that be the case. Could it not be argued that the vast bulk
of the more successful enterprises in terms of police time for
the police is in stopping any person getting access to these sorts
of networks rather than trying to identify the psychology of people
who might wish to access these networks?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes, and
that effort and that focus is very much in place. When you look
at the diagram that I have circulated you will see that actually
there is the opportunity through the closer engagement to pick
up early indications of the bomb factory, of the training camps,
of the meetings in the front room with the radical leader visiting
from London. Neighbourhood policing is actually the place where
those sorts of warning bells would be rung.
Councillor Murphy: May I just
add to that, Mr Betts, if I may, because I would not want to leave
this Channel debate on a negative. There are some very
good examples. I will give you an example of GMP working with
Connexions in Greater Manchester working with children and young
children with learning difficulties aged 13 to 25. On measuring
those outcomes, I think your question is still one that nobody
is able to answer. It is a really good question and I do not know
the answer, but I am just giving you an example here where the
outcomes of the training that takes place—and the GMP are
involved in that with Connexions—are that we are able to
lift the ability for them to access work, because I do believe
that people with learning difficulties are people that can be
targeted. I disagree with Dr Pugh about a point he made earlier
in relation to using people of reasonably high intelligence. The
shooting in Northern Ireland recently, the executioner was a lad
with learning difficulties. So they are recruited and radicalised
in that way.
Q254 Alison Seabeck: The Exeter bomber
was as well.
Councillor Murphy: Absolutely.
What I am saying is that we are trying to engage with the safeguarding
of vulnerable young people, and we are supporting the training
and in some cases facilitating that training. I wanted to give
a positive message about some of the Channel work and the
partnership work that goes on throughout Greater Manchester.
Sir Norman Bettison: If we are
moving off Channel, because I think this is the sort of
Committee that ought to hear me say this, I think it is time now
for Channel to be mainstreamed and not be a separate project.
Q255 Chair: Mainstreamed in what
sense?
Sir Norman Bettison: In terms
of the vulnerability agenda and the safeguarding agenda. Channel
pre-dated the ACPO Prevent strategy. It was a Government
scheme not long after the 2005 bombings, the realisation that
there was not a conduit for information or for identifying vulnerability.
Actually the Prevent strategy and Prevent implementation
plan and all the other joint governmental and partnership work
now means that there is a vocabulary and that there are connections
that we can use without having to badge something separately as
Channel.
Alison Seabeck: That comes back to the
point we made earlier.
Q256 Chair: You do not mean mainstreaming
by getting out of just focusing on the Muslim community?
Mr Charlton: It does not just
focus there.
Councillor Murphy: The point I
was making about for example the GMP scheme with Connexions does
not focus just on the Muslim community. It focuses on 13 to 25-year-olds
with learning difficulties.
Q257 Chair: I am not quite clear
what Sir Norman meant by mainstreaming.
Sir Norman Bettison: I guess I
was linking it to my earlier comments which is one of the greatest
things to come out of Prevent is the better join up between
schools and police, the safer schools partnerships et cetera,
which has created not only the integration and the vocabulary
but the willingness to actually work together in tackling vulnerability
and harm.
Q258 Mr Betts: Can I just come back
to the specific point. We have had a lot of evidence that different
local authorities are probably, naturally, focusing in a different
way on the Prevent agenda and are doing different things.
In terms of the Police Service, the police authorities is there
a coherent sameness about their approach or are there differences
which can be highlighted? Are some police services getting it
more right than others?
Mr Charlton: Do you mean difference
between the Authority and the Service as such?
Q259 Mr Betts: Both.
Mr Charlton: In terms of that
point, first of all, clearly different organisations have different
responsibilities. The police authorities have a statutory responsibility
to ensure an effective and efficient Police Service within the
force area. In that sense the police authorities add value within
the Prevent agenda around providing a scrutiny and an oversight
function of policing. Just to give you a very brief example of
that in a positive context, there has been some controversy recently
that you will no doubt be aware of around the impact of Terrorism
Act stops on local communities. I guess to some extent here we
are back to the Prevent/Pursue debate. Police authorities
around the country monitor those impacts, the impacts of those
stops, the numbers of them and the physical impact on local communities.
It was found that some of those stops were disproportionately
across minority ethnic communities, particularly Muslim communities,
and that was fed back into the policing loop, and as a result
a number of police forces, prominent among them the Metropolitan
Police Service, adjusted their policy around Terrorism Act section
44 stops. That is one example there. Police authorities provide
that scrutiny function. They provide some kind of assurance and
accountability to the local communities that they represent and
serve. In terms of our experience of implementation nationally,
it is hugely variable and it is variable amongst police authorities
because police authorities have different resource levels, they
have different philosophical approaches to Prevent, and
that is only right. That reflects itself across the country. It
is hugely, hugely variable. In terms of the Police Service it
is probably a question that Sir Norman could better answer than
myself.
Sir Norman Bettison: I have lost
track of the question!
Q260 Mr Betts: Is there a coherent
sameness about the approach to these issues across all police
services or would we see different approaches, different emphases
on Prevent in different police services? Are we still learning
and some forces getting it right and others learning from them?
Sir Norman Bettison: Yes to all
three questions. Yes, there is an element of sameness and that
is neighbourhood policing. Unless there is a foundation of neighbourhood
policing you cannot simply pitch up within a community and do
Prevent. It can only be built on a trusted relationship
with the neighbourhood policing role. So, yes, there is the sameness
in that respect that everything is built on neighbourhood policing.
Differences are to do with the differences in our communities.
Nothing gets my goat more than hearing or reading about the "Muslim
community" because it does not exist. We have Muslim communities,
we have very different, very diverse communities, and therefore
the approaches, the level of trust that makes the relationship
capable of being built upon is different, and so we will be doing
in some areas more fundamental stuff around engagement and relationship-building
whereas in other places that relationship and trust is so well
established that it allows us to go even further and do things
in shorthand and be quite progressive. I have been talking so
long now I have forgotten the third element! The third element
of your question was sameness, differences and some forces learning
from others. Are we still at the learning stage? Yes, we are.
We have a national element to our implementation programme which
is a national Prevent delivery unit and part of their role
is garnering best practice but also evaluating what is going on
and that work is informing us all the time.
Councillor Murphy: Very briefly,
just to add to that, there is also significant scrutiny. It is
variable, I will acknowledge, but where it actually takes place
in the big forces like West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester,
we rigorously review the spend for example of counter-terrorism
in Greater Manchester, as they do in West Yorkshire. We rigorously
review the way in which the Prevent agenda is beginning
to evolve. What is factual, as Norman has just outlined, is it
is very early. It is new and we are learning. I suspect when it
was first introduced people were not quite sure what it meant.
Nobody bothered to model it. They just said we will call it Prevent,
one of the four Ps. It fitted in very nicely and then left it
to police authorities, forces and local government to work out.
We are beginning to work it out although I think the most important
message in that working out is that the police should not just
be allowed to be unfettered in the way in which (a) they go about
their business or (b) the money they spend. We bring them to account
on a regular basis. It is based on trust and transparency but
I can assure the Committee that certainly in GMP and I know in
West Yorkshire that occurs and I think it is important we say
that.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed
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