Community Safety Partnerships Research Articles

Is partnership working? Complexities and barriers in the development of community safety practice in Wales

AbstractCommunity safety in England and Wales underwent significant change a quarter of a century ago when community safety partnerships (CSPs) were introduced as part of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Measures to reduce or prevent anti-social behaviour and crime became the responsibility of not just the police but multiple public and third-sector organisations working in partnership. In Wales, additional complexity exists due to most CSP partners operating and working under both the UK, and Welsh Government remit. Findings from mixed-methods research into the training needs of community safety professionals in Wales revealed that support was needed in several areas of practice, including the practicing of meaningful ‘partnership’ working and problem solving. However, given the complex partnership landscape in Wales and lack of clarity around partnership governance, coupled with a seeming overreliance on the police and local government within community safety, the success of collaborative learning and development plans is limited.

Community-Oriented Policing and Violent Crime: Evidence From the Los Angeles Community Safety Partnership

Over the past decade, the Los Angeles Police Department has experimented with a unique model of community-oriented policing called the Community Safety Partnership (CSP). The program places a dedicated set of CSP officers in select housing developments and neighborhoods to engage with residents to better understand and ultimately address the root causes of crime. This study examined the first four waves of the program to assess whether, and the extent to which, the program reduced violent crime. Results reveal significant variation in program effects, with the first wave yielding crime reductions while subsequent waves experienced little to no change in violent crime. Supplemental analyses suggest that the null results for the final three waves of the program were not confounded by increases in crime reporting and reveal that crime reductions following the program’s first wave were not achieved through increases in traditional enforcement (e.g., arrests).

Impact evaluation of the LAPD community safety partnership

In 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), in conjunction with other governmental and nonprofit groups, launched the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) in several public housing developments in Los Angeles. Following a relationship-based policing model, officers were assigned to work collaboratively with community members to reduce crime and build trust. However, evaluating the causal impact of this policy intervention is difficult, given the notable differences between communities where CSP was implemented and the surrounding communities in South Los Angeles. In this paper we use a novel data set, based on the LAPD’s reported crime incidents and calls-for-service, to evaluate the effectiveness of this program via augmented synthetic control models, a cutting-edge method for policy evaluation. We perform falsification analyses to evaluate the robustness of the results. In the public housing developments where it was first deployed, we find that CSP exhibited modest but statistically insignificant reductions in reported violent crime incidents, shots fired and violent crime calls-for-service, and Part I reported crime incidents. We do not find evidence of crime displacement from CSP regions to neighboring control regions.

Austerity, welfare cuts and hate crime: Evidence from the UK's age of austerity

From 2010 the UK entered an ‘age of austerity’, with major cuts to welfare payments. We study the link between these cuts and increases in hate crimes. Using a panel of 313 Community Safety Partnerships areas in England and Wales, we show that for each £100 loss per working age adult, racially or religiously motivated crimes rose by approximately 5-6% in 2013/14 and 2014/15. These effects are large given a mean loss of £450 per working age adult and survive multiple robustness checks. Using individual data, we find no evidence that these crimes are driven by increased anger of the benefit recipients per se but find evidence for a decline in community cohesion.

Risk factors for intimate partner homicide in England and Wales.

Intimate partner homicides are often situated within the context of domestic abuse, and although less prevalent than domestic abuse, there have been several multi‐agency approaches to understanding the risk for these fatal crimes. Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) were introduced in 2011 to provide information to help with assessing such risk. This paper aims to analyse DHRs in England and Wales to investigate/determine risk factors for domestic homicide following intimate partner abuse. All publicly available DHRs published between July 2011 and November 2020 where the victim and perpetrator were or had been intimate partners (N = 263) were retrieved from Community Safety Partnership websites in England and Wales. A quantitative design was used to extract data from DHRs, and descriptive and inferential statistics were generated by SPSS 26. Findings identified risk factors relating to domestic abuse, including stalking, separation, and the victim being in a new relationship. Sociodemographic risk factors included higher levels of deprivation, lower income and higher barriers to housing and services. This highlights the role of both individual and sociodemographic factors in domestic homicides, and particularly the need for greater socioeconomic security for victims of domestic abuse. In conclusion, though much of the data is in line with previous research, our analysis highlights the pivotal role of regional poverty, with comfortable socioeconomic conditions offering protection against intimate partner homicides. This research suggests important directions for future research and makes a valuable contribution to a more in‐depth understanding of the relationship between domestic abuse and intimate partner homicide.

Negotiating organisational blame to foster learning: Professionals’ perspectives about Domestic Homicide Reviews

Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) are a statutory requirement in England and Wales, conducted when somebody aged 16 and over dies from violence, abuse or neglect by a relative, intimate partner or member of the same household. While key aims of DHRs are to identify recommendations and lessons learned to eventually prevent further domestic homicides, there is limited evidence globally regarding the extent to which these are followed up or make a difference. This paper explores the barriers and facilitators to the conduct and impact of DHRs to enhance their learning potential. It is based on nineteen qualitative interviews with professionals involved in the DHR process across five Safeguarding Boards in Wales and fourteen Community Safety Partnerships in the North‐West of England, UK. Findings are presented thematically under four section headings: upskilling and democratising the review process; family and friends’ involvement; negotiating organisational blame to foster learning; and actioning and auditing recommendations. It is suggested that organisational learning cannot be achieved without accepting organisational responsibility, which could be interpreted as blame. The role and skills of the Chair are perceived as key to ensure a safe, evidence‐based, transparent and learning‐focused DHR process. Developing and actioning recommendations may challenge longstanding prejudices. Promoting the role of families/survivor networks and professionals on an equal footing would support a more democratic process. Learning could be enhanced by thematising recommendations and proactively using lessons from one area to inform another. Participants called for appropriate central regulation and accountability to support the action of recommendations.

Spare the rod! Implications for community safety partnerships in removing the reasonable chastisement defence in Wales

Parental discipline of children has long included the use of corporal punishment and has drawn conflicting views upon its effectiveness and its long-term effects upon individuals and society as a whole. This article considers the use of such a tactic by individuals, discussing its use and the research surrounding it at the international and national levels. It explores the introduction of the ‘The Children (Abolition of the Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act,’ which will become law in Wales during March 2022. This Act, whilst not creating a specific criminal act in itself, removes the defence of reasonable chastisement for parents when correcting their children in Wales. The article further considers the potential impact that the removal of the reasonable chastisement clause may have for those agencies charged with overseeing the safety of children, including the potential increase in reported cases and the issues of media and public awareness.

Transitional Safeguarding in London Borough of Hackney: A Case Study

The article reflects upon work undertaken to date to build more robust safeguarding mechanisms for young people aged 16 − 25 years old. Hackney is a diverse and vibrant London Borough, with an estimated population of 280,000 people, of which 48% are under the age of 29. In recognition of this and national work identifying the ‘gap’ in safeguarding provision for 16 − 25 year olds, the City and Hackney Safeguarding Adults Board, with the Community Safety Partnership and Children’s Partnership, set up a Task and Finish Group to address the challenge of Transitional Safeguarding. The article describes the processes adopted by the group to understand what the fundamental safeguarding issues are for young people living in Hackney. It presents key findings from the consultation and how these were subsequently used to influence developmental work regarding Transitional Safeguarding. Hackney was part of the Contextual Safeguarding Pilot and subsequently established a Context Intervention Unit. Influenced by the group’s work, it brings together skills and knowledge from both children’s and adults safeguarding services, to create a bespoke service for young people who may experience extra-familial abuse or exploitation.

Transitional Safeguarding: A Strategic Response

This paper provides an overview of the new safeguarding governance arrangements introduced in Bath & NE Somerset (B&NES), outlining how a Transitional Safeguarding approach is being addressed. B&NES merged the governance arrangements for the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board (LSCB) with the Safeguarding Adults Board (SAB) and Community Safety Partnership (CSP). The primary driver for this was to create an all-encompassing life course approach to the governance of safeguarding in B&NES, through joined up leadership at a strategic level. The aim was to reduce duplication of effort from all safeguarding partners and to ensure that partners were able to prioritise the most effective approach to deliver better joined up services, particularly at the transition points across services, to reduce gaps in provision. Analysis and evaluation of this approach provides evidence that improved delivery of effective governance is beginning to have a positive impact on how services are delivered to support young people, particularly around how Transitional Safeguarding methods are used across Children’s and Adult Services to meet the needs of young people.

Read between the Lines: Using drama to change attitudes towards suicide among young people

Abstract As part of a regional initiative, South Ayrshire Council Community Safety Partnership developed a programme of workshops for secondary schools to contribute to the Scottish Government's Suicide Action Plan. Using an applied drama project titled Read between the Lines as a case study, this article outlines how drama is central to the fulfilment of this national strategy. Utilizing David Kolb's experiential learning cycle to evaluate how young people benefitted from the project, I demonstrate the efficacy of performance as a tool to explore real-life scenarios and in effecting change in young people's understanding of and attitudes to suicide. In doing so, I suggest that more tangibly connected communities are created as a means of improving general well-being.

Learning from domestic homicide reviews in England and Wales.

This paper aims to contribute to the prevention of future domestic homicide by analysing 141 domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) in England and Wales. All publicly available DHRs (n=141) were retrieved from Community Safety Partnership websites in England and Wales in June 2016. Utilising a mixed methods approach, we designed templates to extract quantitative and qualitative data from DHRs. Descriptive statistics were generated by SPSS. 54 DHRs were analysed qualitatively, using N-Vivo for data management. The findings revealed that perpetrators were aged: 16-82years; with a mean average age of 41years. Victims' ages ranged from 17 to 91years old; with a mean average age: 45years. Perpetrators' mental health was mentioned in 65% of DHRs; 49% of perpetrators had a mental health diagnosis. Healthcare services, in particular, mental health services, were most likely to be involved with perpetrators. 'Movement' was identified as a key contextual feature of the 54 DHRs analysed qualitatively and this was found to interact with risk assessment, language barriers and housing problems. In conclusion, domestic violence and abuse risk assessments need to be informed by the knowledge that domestic abuse occurs across the age span. Mental health settings offer an opportunity for intervention to prevent domestic homicide. Domestic Homicide Reviews can provide valuable material for training practitioners.

Building capacity for injury prevention: a process evaluation of a replication of the Cardiff Violence Prevention Programme in the Southeastern USA

ObjectivesViolence is a major public health problem in the USA. In 2016, more than 1.6 million assault-related injuries were treated in US emergency departments (EDs). Unfortunately, information about the magnitude...

Drama therapy tackles trauma

PROJECT Manchester Youth Justice PURPOSE To reduce reoffending by addressing the needs of children in the youth justice system FUNDING Approximately £70,000 a year from Manchester's Community Safety Partnership

Community safety partnerships: the limits and possibilities of ‘policing with the community’

Partnerships between the police and the wider community to tackle safety issues are a cornerstone of contemporary thinking about policing. Using data from two studies into community safety partnerships in Northern Ireland and Scotland, this article argues that the level of policing ‘with’ the community varies greatly depending on the particular safety issue that is being addressed. Using Osborne and Gaebler’s (Reinventing government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector, Plume, New York, 1991) metaphor, I argue that there is a spectrum of issues that moves from inevitably high levels of unilateral police action where the police retain firm control over ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ functions, towards issues that enjoy higher levels of police–community collaboration where ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ can be shared more democratically. Outlining such a spectrum can help clarify the suitable expectations of what community safety partnerships can practically achieve.

Community Safety and Crime Prevention Partnerships: Challenges and Opportunities

In many jurisdictions around the world, community safety and crime prevention activity is supported by interagency committees. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), local government Community Safety Officers (CSOs) lead, support or participate in a range of interagency and ‘whole of government’ networks, most of which were established to support central NSW state government crime prevention and community safety initiatives. Research was conducted with the aim of exploring the CSOs’ experience of the ‘whole of government’ partnerships established to support community safety and crime prevention in NSW.[i] The findings support international research which suggests that central-local partnerships are inhibited by different agendas, responsibilities and power dynamics across different levels of government. Some of the key contextual challenges for this work include concerns about costs shifting from State to local government and about shifting State government priorities; barriers to funding and to accessing crime (and other) data; and various administrative burdens. Consequently, we argued that there is a need for formal engagement and negotiation between, on the one hand, State government agencies that steer NSW crime prevention and, on the other, community safety policy initiatives and local government. Such engagement could help overcome the perception, indeed the reality, that shifting and dumping costs and responsibilities to local government is creating a range of burdens for CSOs. [i] The authors thank the NSW Local Government Community Safety and Crime Prevention Network and the individual local government CSOs who kindly assisted and contributed to this research.

Evidence review study of public health interventions in policing: an example of translating evidence into practice for implementation of effective interventions for crime reduction

BackgroundWe describe the use of a study group to assess the potential effectiveness of proactive and place-based approaches to reduce crime in two localities that focused on domestic violence (DV). Evidence-based policing operates under the same principles as evidence-based medicine to use the best scientific evidence. Research and analysis became part of the conversation about how to reduce crime, increase legitimacy, and address internal problems, in an effort to make the large body of research evidence more accessible to practitioners in terms of both generalised principles and specific examples of interventions. MethodsWe used a Campbell Collaboration systematic review that has been developed in the USA into an online practice translation instrument (resource pack) by Lum, Koper, and Telep (2009), called the evidence-based policing matrix. Using rapid appraisal theory, a study group of multidisciplinary stakeholders appraised the evidence presented in the matrix. They first prioritised DV over other crimes on the basis of recent statistical and performance information before appraising summaries of 16 intervention research papers specifically on DV to identify and prioritise the most promising interventions that could be transferred or adapted as part of a local action plan through a series of structured and facilitated meetings, resulting in an evidence report with recommendations. FindingsIn both Derbyshire and Sandwell, numbers of DV calls to the police are estimated annually (n=6000). DV incidents are under-reported. The study group established locally that around 80% of perpetrators of DV may not receive any further advice or intervention after the first reported incident to the police and will return into the community without any conditions imposed. Therefore, the group decided to focus on DV. The rapid appraisal process undertaken by the group identified arrest as an effective police response for reduction of DV, but there were several contextual factors to consider when developing an appropriate local policy response. The consensus that emerged within the study group was that arrest was the start of a process that should include other interventions for the victim and the perpetrator, and the applicability of this process was explored within Derbyshire and Sandwell contexts by drawing on local professional knowledge. The study suggested six potential types of interventions: mandatory arrest; system-initiated warrants for suspects absent at the scene; follow-up home visit interventions; DV unit; public education programme; and treatment programmes. InterpretationWe describe a novel example of use of science and knowledge transfer methodology to transfer evidence to police as joint partners. The police are using these findings to implement changes in their arrest policies and are designing new programmes for perpetrators to be implemented after arrest on the basis of a victim-led restorative justice approach, whereby a perpetrator who admits the offence can access specialised services aimed at future prevention. Derbyshire is piloting the domestic abuse perpetrator scheme and Sandwell is designing a similar intervention. For public health, police, and other organisations to collaborate, they came together under the theme of prevention and reduction of violence to improve the wider determinants of health. Key to this process is motivation and alliance with the community safety partnership; acceptance within the police of recommendations from front-line staff involved in the knowledge translation process; and understanding of limitations of data for statistical evidence. FundingDepartment of Health National Institute for Health Research, Birmingham and Black Country Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care programme.

CAN AMBULANCE DATA BE USED TO REDUCE COMMUNITY VIOLENCE? EXPLORATORY RECORD LINKAGE STUDY

Objectives & BackgroundEmergency Department information sharing with Community Safety Partnerships and the Police is well established, Emergency Department Data about the location, time of assault and weapon type is shared...

A problem‐oriented approach to the production of strategic intelligence assessments

Purpose – The strategic intelligence assessment (SIA) plays an important role in contemporary intelligence‐led policing by helping to identify strategic priorities for policing activity, crime reduction and improvements in community safety. Originally defined in the UK's National Intelligence Model, the SIA is produced annually by all local UK police districts as well as other agencies in the UK and internationally that have adopted intelligence‐led principles. The purpose of this paper is to critique the two most common approaches to its production, structuring its content following a “crime‐type” template or an assessment that is based on previous strategic priorities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper's critique is based on reviewing one hundred SIAs from police forces and Community Safety Partnerships in the UK and through speaking to practitioners on their experiences in using these intelligence products to determine strategic priorities.Findings – The paper identifies weaknesses in both, arguin...

Using the vulnerable localities index to identify priority areas for targeting fire safety services

The Vulnerable Localities Index (VLI) is a popular analytical method used by police agencies in England and Wales to identify residential neighbourhoods that should be prioritised for attention. The VLI uses data on crime, deprivation and socio-demography to form a single composite index value for small geographic areas, which when mapped can assist in determining where to target neighbourhood policing and crime prevention initiatives. Its use has also helped to prompt other public sector partners such as local municipal government agencies to recognise the collaborative role that they could play with the police in helping to address mutual issues of public safety. Fire safety agencies have also expressed interest in the VLI, but to date this has mainly involved offering a supporting role to the police and local community safety partnerships on crime specific matters of public safety, with a focus on fire safety often on the periphery. In part this is due to limited analysis into whether the priority areas identified by the VLI are also areas of key concern to fire services. This research explores this relationship, identifying that the priority neighbourhoods of interest to the police are also areas where there are significantly higher than expected levels of deliberate fires and malicious false alarm calls to the fire service. These findings suggest that in the spirit of partnership working, potential opportunities exist in achieving mutually beneficial gains in improving public safety through the collaboration of fire, police and other local public service delivery.

Police and Crime Commissioners: The Changing Landscape of Police Governance in England and Wales: Their Potential Impact on Local Accountability, Police Service Delivery and Community Safety

This article considers the potential impact of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) on the governance and accountability of the police in England and Wales. The article assesses the powers and responsibilities of PCCs and their future responsibility for developing local police strategies. It considers the potential impact of the direct election of PCCs and the relationship between elected PCCs and the chief constable, where future election success may depend on the extent to which the local police force has achieved the objectives set for it by the PCC. The article goes on to consider the changing nature of local electoral politics and the need for local political party infrastructure to sustain an election campaign within individual (and often large) police force areas. The article thereafter considers the potential threat that PCCs as budget holders may represent to existing Community Safety Partnerships, along with the undoubted and continuing benefits that arise from police partnerships with local authorities.