SOCIAL APPROACH
SOCIAL APPROACH TO ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
Last year, Shadow Policing Minister Sarah Jones MP went on a country-wide
tour, meeting police officers, PCSOs, Fed reps, and PCCs delivering innovative approaches to tackle antisocial behaviour
Sarah caught up with POLICE Magazine to discuss her findings and her thoughts on solutions for current ASB issues.
Can you tell us how your policing tour came about?
When I became Shadow Policing Minister, a lot of people were raising the issues of neighbourhood policing and antisocial behaviour (ASB). These issues include what is sometimes called ‘lower-level’ crimes, such as drug taking on the streets, bad behaviour from groups of kids, neighbours from hell, homes used for drug dealing, and so on. Those issues are not being tackled, and I wanted to talk to police, and crime commissioners, and the public, to learn more. Having been to almost every region in
12 | POLICE | APRIL 2022
England and Wales, I now have a clearer sense of what some of those issues are, and what some of the solutions might be. We have seen, I think, 10 years of failure from this government. Failure to tackle crime, failure to support victims, and failure to support the police by them still having less money, in real terms, than they did in 2010. And failure to introduce the reforms that we think would lead to better outcomes.
How long was this tour and what were the underlying feelings from places you visited? I started the tour after summer and continued throughout the autumn, visiting a new area every week. It was fascinating because, as someone who has always
lived in a London borough, I have a certain perception of the kind of neighbourhood related problems that we face. But of course, these are different across the country, and from force to force. However, the sense that people don’t see the police on their streets as much as they used to, that sometimes there is no point reporting crimes because nothing will be done; and the sense from the police that they really need the extra resources, because they want to be in those neighbourhoods preventing crime and tackling it when it happens, were the same in every part of the country I visited.
What did a standard day on the tour look like? There really wasn’t a standard day. In
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
