Summary
· Prompted by the summer 2011 riots, the
Government conducted a review assessing the scale and causes of
gang and youth violence. The 'Ending Gang and Youth Violence'
strategy, which aims to match a robust enforcement response with
robust support to exit gang life and an intensive prevention strategy,
has been running for three years.
· The Home Office has spent over £10
million on its Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme, but has
failed to effectively evaluate the project. The Home Office must
undertake high-quality comparative evaluation in order to assess
what works best in combating gang and youth crime and in identifying
areas for improvement.
· It is vital that a unified gang definition
is used across the Home Office and police forces to ensure greater
understanding of the scale of this issue both locally and nationally.
· Every Chief Constable should appoint a
lead officer responsible for combating gangs, including mentoring
and training officers and addressing the needs of gang-associated
individuals at risk of sexual exploitation.
· The Home Office should produce a league
table of gang injunctions on a six monthly basis. The lead officer
on gangs in every police force should be responsible for a continuing
programme of peer reviews to ensure the efficacy and increased
uptake of gang injunctions.
· The Committee welcomes the launch of the
national voluntary scheme to reduce the number of no-suspicion
stop and search powers. It is vital that forces undertake local
consultation work to ensure that complaints processes are accessible
to young people of all backgrounds, to help restore young people's
confidence in the complaints system.
· It is clear that young people feel that
their experiences are not taken into account. The Home Office's
annual evaluation of the gangs programme should also include statements
from local lead police officers stating what work they have completed
on gangs and stop and search alongside young people's responses.
· We should accept that children as young
as seven are at risk of gang involvement. The Committee believes
that the primary school anti-gang education programme should be
expanded. In every school where there is local knowledge of gangs,
a senior teacher should be nominated to ensure mentoring to assist
young people at risk of gang involvement.
· The Committee recommends that the existing
work of local organisations that are well supported and have grown
from the resident communities, such as Gangsline and the SOS project,
should be expanded. The Home Office should ensure that detailed
evaluation is undertaken of projects deemed to be examples of
best practice, in order to create models that can work for communities
across the country.
· Programmes with records
of turning around the lives of young people in gangs and with
entrenched behavioural difficulties need to be commissioned more
consistently. The Government should expand support for mentoring
programmes that focus on gang-affected young people.
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