Safer Neighbourhoods - focus item

Report: 7
Date: 15 March 2007
By: Assistant Commissioner Territorial Policing on behalf of the Commissioner

Summary

This report provides an overview of some key aspects of the MPS Safer Neighbourhoods programme. It includes

• A brief account of the Safer Neighbourhoods Performance Framework
• Consideration of the impact of Safer Neighbourhoods on communities
• A discussion of the role of Safer Neighbourhoods teams in most challenging wards

A. Recommendation

That Members note the report.

B. Supporting information

The Safer Neighbourhoods Performance Management Framework

1. The business case for Safer Neighbourhoods rested upon the desire of the MPS to introduce a community-based policing style of operation that would meet the needs of Londoners. The aim of this policing style was identified as:

“…to identify and tackle those crimes and events that disproportionately impact on the quality of life and the feeling of insecurity of London’s citizens. Dedicated police resources will deliver the reassurance the public want and significantly impact upon their feeling of safety by identifying local interventions that control visible signs of disorder and anti-social behaviour in neighbourhoods” [1]

2. The establishment of an effective performance management framework for neighbourhood policing has, historically, proved to be extremely problematic. Within the United Kingdom, research is currently being carried out by the Home Office to try and develop such a framework. However, recognising the central role of performance management in ensuring that Londoners are provided with a best value policing service and in driving improved performance within Borough Command Units (BCUs) across London, the MPS has developed its own framework. This framework links high-level pan-London outcomes with activity within each neighbourhood.

3. The criteria for selection of the high level outcomes of the Safer Neighbourhoods programme were that these outcomes should be those desired within the original business case. In addition, they had to be those for which Safer Neighbourhoods teams could reasonably be held to be solely or overwhelmingly responsible for the delivery of activity that would affect the relevant outcome measure. Using this criteria, the following measures were identified as the key outcomes of the programme:

1. Concern about anti social behaviour (ASB)
2. Perceptions of safety in local area by day and by night
3. Satisfaction with local policing
4. Confidence that police are identifying and dealing with issues that are the priorities for local people.

4. In order to monitor these outcomes, the Safer Neighbourhoods Programme monitors relevant survey questions within the quarterly Public Attitude Survey (PAS). The MPS Public Attitude Survey currently captures the views of 8,000 adult residents in London in the course of a year. Interviews are conducted face to face, take place in residents’ homes and are conducted throughout the year. Results from this survey are then used to populate the Safer Neighbourhoods performance management framework. By aggregating these results over a 12 month period (to provide both a statistically valid sample and also to even out seasonal variations) the MPS is now able to provide results at CDRP/ BCU level on a quarterly basis as well. To ensure more effective tracking of performance at BCU level, the sample size for the PAS survey is to be increased to over 20,000 with effect from April 2007.

5. The specific questions being used to track Safer Neighbourhoods Performance are:

• How good a job do you think the police in this area are doing?
• To what extent do you think the police understand the issues that affect this community?
• To what extent do you think the police are dealing with the issues that matter to people in this community?
• To what extent are you worried about anti-social behaviour in your area?
• How safe do you feel walking alone, in your area, during the day?
• How safe do you feel walking alone, in your area, during the night?

6. The requirement to ensure that survey results are statistically significant means that whilst it is possible to obtain validated outcomes at BCU level, it is not possible to do the same at neighbourhood level. However, it is clearly essential to ensure that individual teams are performing effectively and delivering a quality service to local residents. As a consequence, the MPS examined national best practice in terms of delivering improved performance within the relevant outcome areas. This best practice is represented by what is termed the ‘Seven Stage Model’. The MPS then developed a system to track delivery by Safer Neighbourhoods teams of outputs in each stage of the policing model (research, community engagement, establish public preferences, investigation and analysis, selection of priorities, plan & act, review). This system is known as ‘EPIC’ (an acronym for ‘Enforcement, Prevention, Intelligence and Communication’). Examples of the types of activity tracked are: the number of pre-planned meetings held; attendance at the meetings; numbers of street briefings held; intelligence reports submitted; number of ASB letters and home visits; number of ABCs; number of crack houses closed; number of arrests.

7. The EPIC system also tracks the nature of Public Priorities and the number of public priorities that are resolved by the Safer Neighbourhoods teams.

8. Aside from establishing primary outcomes expected from Safer Neighbourhoods teams, the MPS has also developed a benefits profile that outlines a wider number of areas in which the Safer Neighbourhood has a positive impact but for which it is not solely responsible (i.e. crime reduction and visibility).

9. Early work on this form of policing in London was subject to research to identify the secondary benefits of the Safer Neighbourhoods style of policing. The secondary benefits identified included reduced stock shrinkage in local shops, increased footfall in town centre areas and reduced costs to a range of public sector organisations (including London Fire Brigade and Education departments). These benefits are currently too complex to be tracked at CDRP or London level, nevertheless individual problem solving initiatives do set out very specific secondary benefits that are produced by the work of the Safer Neighbourhoods teams.

10. Effective performance management of neighbourhood policing has proved to be a consistent problem for forces across the world that have recognised the need to adopt a community focussed approach. Research at national and international level suggests that the MPS is currently a world leader in terms of both the sophistication and robust nature of its approach. However, it is also recognised that performance management against these outcome measures remains a complex and challenging undertaking.

11. Given that there is relatively little research that proves the links between specific tactical interventions and service-wide crime reduction, it is far harder to connect Safer Neighbourhoods Team (SNT) outputs to outcomes that and are far less robust than recorded crime and which may, potentially, be affected by other issues over which individual SNTs or even the MPS may have little control (for example, media and political debate over ASB). Whilst the MPS is currently using evaluated national best practice (gained through over three years of research by the National Reassurance Policing Programme), the Safer Neighbourhood (SN) Programme is aware of the need to maintain a vigorous research and evaluation programme to supplement the performance framework in order to ensure that emerging lessons are used quickly and effectively to improve the practice of individual teams.

12. Early results at BCU level have also posed challenges to the way in which SN performance links to other performance areas. For example, the concept of the reassurance gap, a key driver of the SN programme, is based upon a situation in which a BCU with relatively low recorded levels of crime and disorder has high levels of concern about ASB and fear of crime. However, results have also indicated that there are BCUs with the reverse trend – i.e. high levels of recorded crime and disorder coupled with low levels of concern about ASB and fear of crime. Performance at a pan-London level needs to improve in terms of both perception and the reality of crime – but within individual BCUs there may need to be a stronger awareness of the interplay between these two sets of outcome measures. It would be unfortunate if an inappropriate perception that an area was safe at night led to an increase in victimisation. To avoid this scenario it is essential that the SN performance management is undertaken robustly but that it is also fully integrated within the broader performance management processes at BCU and pan-London level.

Impact of Safer Neighbourhoods on communities

13. Whilst, as outlined above, the Public Attitude Survey has been used to generate performance information and some insight into the drivers of improved performance, a separate piece of research, the Safer Neighbourhoods Survey, has been used to conduct a more detailed examination of the impact of Safer Neighbourhoods teams at neighbourhood level. This survey has been conducted in two sweeps, exploring the experiences of policing in 23 wards [2]. The following are some of the high level findings out of this survey of local policing.

• Across the 23 study wards, there is an increase in confidence in policing between the two sweeps.
• There is no evidence that the SN teams alone ‘automatically’ lead to greater confidence in policing. Those respondents who substantially gain confidence have a higher expectation in police improvement, were less afraid of crime and felt stronger social cohesion than other respondents.
• Individual change in opinion about policing, rather than community (or group) change, affects overall confidence in policing. This means that:
  • Individual differences influence attitude more than the area where people live.
  • Wards are very diverse areas. Wards – as areas - are not necessarily meaningful to the way people live in London. There appears to be a mismatch between the boundaries of a ward and the area residents perceive as their neighbourhood.
  • How neighbourhood policing meets the needs of a geographically defined area (a ward) is more complicated as a consequence.
    Where public opinion about local problems converges, people tend to agree about the “most serious” problems. Public concerns in any ward appear to be driven by some overall concern about crime and disorder, followed by concerns about ‘more serious crime’ and ‘theft and violence against a person’.

13. When completed, the findings of the Safer Neighbourhoods Survey will be used to inform further developments in operational guidance and policy for Safer Neighbourhoods teams across London.

Most Challenging Wards Programme

14. The Challenging Wards Programme is a five-phase programme of work directed at serious violent crime in eight “pathfinder” ward areas across London; it is due for completion in March 2008.

15. The selection of these wards was based on absolute figures for violence supported by local and crime intelligence analysis.

16. The challenging wards programme aims to harness better use of intelligence, Joint Action Group (JAG) working and the development of a tactical and strategic control strategy for violent crime to deliver – in the 8 selected wards - an action plan, for 2007/08, involving targeted work around high risk offenders, vulnerable victims and problem locations.

17. Currently, performance in the challenging wards is measured in two slightly different ways. The focus for both approaches is a comparison between figures for the MPS as a whole with figures for the challenging wards and their surrounding wards. Data is monitored for (a) Violence Against the Person Offences (VAP) and (b) Serious Violence (i.e. Murder, GBH, Rape and Robbery of Personal Property.

18. Ward based performance for April to October 2006 has been compared with the same period in 2005. For this period, volume VAP is down 6.4% in the challenged wards, slightly less than the figure of 6.6% for the MPS as a whole. The figure for the surrounding wards is down 4.8%.

19. In the challenging wards serious violence is up very slightly (just 1 offence), compared to a 0.4% reduction across the MPS. This category is dominated by robbery of personal property.

20. The focus of the Challenging Wards Programme is clearly upon recorded crime rather than wards that are challenged in the sense of very high levels of fear of crime, concern about ASB or dissatisfaction with local policing. However, SNTs have a critical role within the BCU response to high levels of serious and violent crime and their role demonstrates at a local level the contribution that SN can make to other areas of performance at a pan-London level and within every neighbourhood.

21. First and foremost, the role of SNTs in these neighbourhoods is to ensure that they have fully delivered the seven stage policing model. This means that they will have developed a full profile of the community in their neighbourhood and that they will then have used a range of engagement tools to reach every section of that community. The engagement will have been conducted with a clear purpose – to identify the crime and disorder issues that most affect local people. Part of this engagement will include the development of a Key Individual Network – who will have access and/ or represent every section of the community in their neighbourhood. The team will then have built a Neighbourhood Panel that is built from a collection of key stakeholders and partners and which will use community intelligence obtained from engagement to make an informed choice as to local priorities in their neighbourhood.

22. This engagement and networking activity is used to identify and tackle local priorities but is also a structure that can act as the foundation of a wide range of other action. In principle, with confidence built upon an understanding that SNTs are dealing with local concerns, local people will be increasingly confident to engage with police on a wide range of issues. This should include an increased flow of intelligence about local problems and offenders and an increasing ability for the MPS to access and involve communities in a wide range of preventative work. Strong local community networks, founded and maintained by SNTs and built upon a confidence that local issues will be dealt with effectively by police, will provide the foundation for proactive work to tackle a far wider range of policing issues – spanning volume and violent crime to counter-terrorism.

23. An additional feature of SNT work within challenging wards is the potential utilisation of the link between community priorities and other policing priorities. For example, street crime (and many other forms of street based violence) is visible to the MPS by virtue of recorded crime and incident statistics. However, the split second nature of a robbery is unlikely to make this event “visible” to many local people, other than to those who have directly experienced it. But individual street crime offences often occur within the context of broader behavioural problems – which are significantly more visible to and have more impact upon local communities. This is frequently expressed in terms of local concern about anti-social behaviour and, as an example, recent concerns about the level of street crime have been accompanied by an increase in neighbourhood concerns about ASB committed by young people. There are, unsurprisingly, several examples of where SNT work to tackle ASB by young people has had a direct impact upon individuals committing street crime offences and upon levels of street crime.

C. Race and equality impact

1. Improved performance within SNTs will provide continual improvement in the service provided by the MPS to the diverse communities of London. This remains a key driver for ensuring that an effective performance management regime is developed for Neighbourhood policing and that attention is paid to ensuring continual organisational learning.

2. The relationship between the priorities of local people and more traditional policing priorities / targets will remain a complex one. Genuine empowerment of local neighbourhoods will inevitably result in the prioritisation of issues that are at odds with existing concerns at BCU level. However local, BCU and MPS priorities are not inevitably separate and early evidence suggests that local communities are often identifying issues that are not separate but merely a different perspective on classic BCU performance issues. The benefits of focussing on local priorities are therefore not merely a mechanism to build confidence and community networks that can engage more effectively with police but are also, frequently, an indirect but nevertheless a best value approach to the classic problems of crime and disorder reduction that the MPS must also address.

D. Financial implications

1. As outlined above, performance management of the Safer Neighbourhoods Programme is dependant upon data from the Public Attitude Survey (PAS). Given that the PAS is commissioned to support a broad range of stakeholders, there is no additional cost to the MPS for this performance information.

2. However, the use of PAS data as an SN performance measure was a key consideration in the decision to expand the numbers of people surveyed in 2007/8. This increase adds capability in two areas. First, the MPS will be able to acquire BCU Performance information on a quarterly basis as opposed to the current position which relies on data aggregated over a rolling 12 months. This change will enable more accurate tracking of performance trends and of the impact of activity designed to improve performance. The second area of added capability will be increased opportunity to track performance in smaller population groups (i.e. victims of crime).

3. This increase in survey numbers will increase the cost of the PAS. The additional funding will be obtained by a reduction in surveying activity in other areas (most notably through a reduction in the number of wards being focussed on by the Safer Neighbourhood Survey).

E. Background papers

None

F. Contact details

Report author: Ch Supt Stephen Bloomfield, Safer Neighbourhoods Unit, MPS

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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