Policing for the future

1. Executive Summary

• Our submission focusses on the extent to which police are equipped to deal with changing patterns of crime and the role of digital technology
• Research conducted at Nottingham Trent University has highlighted gaps in capacity and capability of the police on issues surrounding hate, misogyny, vulnerability and police training and awareness of these issues
• Perspectives of victims and perpetrators has been examined along with reflections from police officers
• This submission highlights the areas of stress we have uncovered and provides a series of recommendations we’d like to see taken forward through reform to training and service delivery for Police Officers
• Our experience relates directly to hate crime from a victim and perpetrator perspective but we believe much of these recommendations and findings can be transferred to other areas of UK Policing
• This submission also seeks to strengthen and support the role of multi-agency working to tackle crime and community safety issues.

2. Dr Loretta Trickett

Dr Trickett’s research focuses on hate crime and gendered victimisation. She is a member of a number of Working Groups on Hate Crime in Nottinghamshire. She is a board member of the International Network of Hate Scholars. She is also on the editorial board for both The Internet Journal of Criminology and IARS.

3. Dr Paul Hamilton

Dr Hamilton’s research is based on offenders and offender management alongside an interest in hate crime. He is currently developing work with perpetrators of crime in partnership with a variety of organisations. Prior to his time in academia he spent eight years in the commercial sector, which included a period working as an account manager for a large automotive IT company based in the West Midlands. Paul also worked as a research executive for a privately funded social research organisation. The commercial and research skills gained during this period have proved invaluable in the academic arena.

4. Nottingham Trent University

Nottingham Law School is outstanding and long established national and international reputation for excellence in legal education. We are one of the largest university law schools in the UK, with over 100 academic staff and 2,500 students. School of Social Sciences is a nationally and internationally recognised centre for the study of engaged social science. We offer a wide range of courses, which address the key social issues of today.

5. Submission

We are living in challenging times for policing as technology provides ever-growing ways of committing crime during a time that police budgets are rapidly shrinking. Increasingly, the police are being expected to do more with less. The pressure on other service providers including the NHS exacerbates rises in operational demand for the police. Multi-agency partnerships have come to the fore within the policing context but the police are still viewed as ‘the 24 hour emergency service’ operator.

For the police and other multi-agency partners, the ‘vulnerable’ victim has assumed a particular significance within the criminal justice system. Such victims include, amongst others, victims of hate crime, victims of sexual abuse and grooming including children and victims of domestic violence.

The way that we train the police and help them to identify vulnerable victims is of utmost importance. Equally important is the way in which we safeguard vulnerable victims and how we shape prosecutions and deal with offenders. We also need to understand the relationships, contexts and patterns between on-line and off-line offending. It is more important than ever that the police have the trust of the public.

The College of Policing has recently announced that from 2020 all police officers will need a university degree. The syllabus is likely to put particular emphasis on the aforementioned issues of building trust with the public, tackling cyber-crime and safeguarding the vulnerable.

At Nottingham Trent University, we have been working on a series of research projects that have identified gaps and problems with capacity and capability of the police around police training, risk assessments and emerging forms of hate crime. Although the research has predominantly focused on hate crime victims and perpetrators, the issues and the suggestions for improvement also apply to other vulnerable victims such as children, the elderly, and victims with learning disabilities and those with mental conditions. The researchers involved in these projects are members of the Hate Crime Steering Group Nottingham. This group is made up of Nottinghamshire Police and the Police and Crime Commissioner, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Probation Service, Nottinghamshire Council and other public and private service providers on hate crime. The projects and the key points identified are outlined below:

The prosecution of Disability Hate Crime in the East Midlands

Research Study involved a systematic case analysis of CPS case files for the East Midlands over a 12-month period. Findings published as a book chapter in 2015.

Key Findings

• Cases flagged as potential disability hate crimes were rarely prosecuted as such.
• Hostility was rarely identified or pursued and opportunities to prosecute as Disability Hate Crime were missed.
• Uplift tariff was used in only one case in the research period

The Policing of Hate Crime in Nottingham

Hate Crime Training of Police Officers in Nottingham: A Critical Review full report (PDF, 1.43MB)

Qualitative Research Study with front-line Police Officers including Beat Managers, PCSOs and Response Officers on their experiences of training and dealing with hate crime. Following this research, a new risk assessment tool was developed and implemented in partnership with Nottinghamshire Police.

Key Findings

• Police Officers knowledge on hate crime was limited to knowledge on legislation and procedures.
• Officers often lacked confidence on how to identify hostility in hate crime cases or on the difference between hate crime and anti-social behaviour.
• Officers felt that there was poor alignment between the realities of policing hate crime and the knowledge needed to respond effectively to victims.
• Officers felt disconnected from hate crime training which was largely delivered on-line via NCALT.
• Officers felt that hate crime risk assessment tools were poorly designed and did not properly reflect levels of risk of hate crime victims.
• Officers struggled to identify lines of support when safeguarding victims and often spent considerable amounts of time trying to identify support for victims.
• Officers lacked experience of meaningful interactions with hate crime victims and felt that these needed to be incorporated into training sessions.
• There was a poor alignment between educational literature on teaching of adults and the methods utilised in police training.

Pilot study with young offenders – Dr Paul Hamilton and The Holocaust Centre, Nottingham.

In partnership with Nottinghamshire Police and the National Holocaust Centre, we have developed a programme that challenges the thinking and behaviour of people, who have committed, or are at risk of committing, a hate crime or hate incident. This may include those who hold extreme views about different communities and members of groups or political parties who promote these views. Initially this programme target at young people, but eventually will be available for all hate crime perpetrators.

The programme uses the National Holocaust Centre and its exhibition The Journey. (The first exhibition in the UK built purely for the purpose of educating children about the Holocaust, which, follows a Jewish family living in Berlin in 1938 and takes visitors through their experiences of hate crimes and isolation.) The programme participants to consider the impact of their behaviour and the consequences of hate crimes. The perpetrator programme includes sessions before and after the visit to the exhibition, where the group are asked to consider the implications of their actions and whom they may have affected.

The programme is open to referrals from officers, staff and external partners. Whilst some delegates will have been through the justice system and had the programme mandated by a court or the Youth Offending service, there is scope for young people who may be under the age of criminal responsibility, at a pre-justice system level of intervention or who may not have yet committed an offence, to take part in the programme. The aim to challenging their behaviour at an early stage and preventing escalation.

This work and the ongoing evaluation will develop a more nuanced understanding of hate crime perpetrators behaviours, which, will inform multi-agency team working and support these perpetrators to explore their motivations. Our aim is that this work feeds into further training and contextual briefings for police officers and partners that will improve vulnerable victim’s treatment and support. We also aim to use this research to better inform Police and CPS decisions on prosecution.

Pilot project on recording Misogyny as Hate Crime

Nottinghamshire Police - Chief Constable Sue Fish, The Women’s Centre - Mel Jeffs and NTU - Dr Loretta Trickett.

As part of our ongoing commitment to work in a multi-agency way NTU have been working in partnership with the Police and The Nottingham Women’s Centre to evaluate the effect of the introduction of Misogynistic Street Harassment as hate crime in Nottingham. This initiative followed the Nottingham Citizens Inquiry into Hate Crime, which, found that women in the city frequently experienced sexual harassment on the streets and in other public venues and that many of them considered this to be hate crime. Nottinghamshire Police has begun to record such incidents as a hate crime and then investigate them. This initiative has received both national and international attention. An evaluation of the initiative is being conducted by Nottingham Trent University. Building on the hate crime risk assessments designed by Dr Paul Hamilton, Dr Loretta Trickett and Dave Alton, Hate Crime Manager of Nottinghamshire Police we have provided training on this category to call operators and front line officers. This training draws on insights from the aforementioned Policing Report. There is also a national policy interest in rolling out this categorisation for misogyny hate crime, which will require further training, and support for front line officer and partners.

6. Recommendations

• In our opinion dealing with Hate Crime (and other forms of crime) effectively, requires a multi-agency approach. It is neither realistic (or equitable) to expect the police service to prevent and deal with Hate Crime – or indeed any social ‘problem’ – in a unilateral way. Police clearly have an important role to play, but this role has to be delivered in conjunction with others. Given this, training needs to take a more ‘holistic’ focus, which, reflects this multi-agency requirement
• Training for Police needs to focus to have stronger skills based focus and there needs to be a greater emphasis on ‘why’ officers are doing the training and ‘how’ these skills might benefit them in their daily policing. We have been developing such approaches with partners across Nottinghamshire
• Update and development of risk assessment should be a priority for vulnerable groups. (Copies of our risk assessment on hate crime is available on request and is being considered for national roll out) Training for the police on procedures and risk assessment needs to place a greater weight on the ‘Why’ rather than on the ‘How’ so that there is a less formulaic approach to doing risk assessments. With this in mind, it would help if training on risk assessment was be informed by actual cases from Vulnerable Victims Panel and/or Case Conferencing in order to provide proper context
• Community members should have more opportunities to develop and design appropriate training programmes. Training should use experience to generate meaningful, quality examples/exercises. Again, empathy should be at the heart of the training experience. Whilst empathy is ‘key’, there is no magic formula for dealing with vulnerable victims, as empathy is needed in dealing with all victims. What is important for building empathy with vulnerable victims however to recognise and respond to their needs and this must be where training is focused. For example with Disability Hate Crime, whilst officers cannot be trained on all types of disability, there is scope for more ‘bespoke’ training in this area to help achieve this
• There needs to be much more emphasis and better use of visual imagery and role-plays. Where NCALT is used, this should NOT be used to replace face-to-face training, but to compliment it and provide a resource for officers to go back to. We value the impact of online training but believe that in its current format it is not fit for purpose. A more interactive and engaging system must be developed to improve its effectiveness
• We argue for a more evidence based and pedagogically sound training system for police officers that draws on educational best practice and ensures real work examples and mixed media training are developed. An example of such an approach is available through our work on misogyny hate crime where workshop sessions with victims were run for Police Officers to enable more empathic connections between officers and vulnerable victims
• CPS should provide further information on why and in what circumstances cases come to court (use anonymous examples of cases that did (not) meet the threshold and why) and how the sentence uplift works and why this is important. Different examples of how hostility can be established in cases such as ‘mate crime’ are also needed. Any initiatives to facilitate this sharing of information between the CPS and the police service are to be welcomed
• A far greater range of resources needs to be made available to the police including information on identifying disability and communicating with victims and how to safeguard them. Much better use of technology is needed here which could build on the design of Pegasus and Pocket Comms. Currently officers have to spend a lot of time trying to find this information and chasing up other agencies for it. A database for officers, which can be stored on an electronic device, needs to be developed and other agencies have a key role to play in helping with the design and production of the information that it requires. The successful implementation of Niche can only be successful if developed in partnership with other agencies to establish effective and relevant links that reduce time spent searching for referrals and information.