The first aid approach to community safety: views of a tourist in wonkdom

Ben Rogers in yesterday's Guardian:

'Strengthening civility and neighbourhoods is important, but the police have only a minor role to play. Other things – the way places are designed, traffic is managed and the public realm is maintained; the character of shops and local public services, the provision of activities for young people – are just as important as anything the police can do.'

(Most of these and more were covered in Respect in the neighbourhood)

'Some figures have a particularly important role to play in maintaining local social order – park keepers, estate managers, shop keepers. But the capacity of a community or neighbourhood as a whole to help police itself is also crucial.'

The role played here by citzen-run neighbourhood websites should not be missed: our research suggests that where they exist they are greatly valued residents and agencies for the way they facilitate the maintenance of local order. He then goes on to talk about a first aid approach to community safety -

'training people beyond the police to deal with antisocial behaviour... People can be taught how to read a situation so they know when it is appropriate and safe to intervene, and when to call the police. They can be shown how to protect themselves and others from attack. And they can be given mediation and conflict resolution skills. As with first aid, this training should be available to anyone who wants it.'

It's the next step in the logic of co-production. I can see benefits and attractions. But it would be the next step in the formalisation of informal neighbourhood life: like Neighbourhood Watch, it's formalising relations on a basis of distrust, rather than trust.

Starting from trust of course is far harder. As some of the comments insist, there needs to be a better appreciation shown for the realities of living with the threat of the kind of anti-social behaviour that does require policing. Rogers leaves himself wide open to exactly this kind of reponse:

'Can someone arrange for the author to leave cloud-cuckoo land or whichever magical land of dreams he inhabits and demonstrate his idea on one of our estates? The last time I saw some yobs dismantling a bus shelter they had an overexcited pit bull with them. As I didn't know dogspeak for 'Calm down bro. Let's talk through the issues', I left them too it.'

Or this:

'We need proper policing to deal with louts, and not some Big Society codswallop.'

I know what Ben is trying to say, but that comment resonates with me because I have a strong sense of what people experience and their desperation at ever getting a response from policy. It's not good enough to say that ASB is not out of control, because the same people go on experiencing it and have done for a very long time.

'Not out of control' reads 'hasn't yet spread to middle class areas'.

The intention behind the first aid approach to community safety is to address lower level incivility; but there's a real problem in distinguishing unstable behaviour that might be just boisterousness, but could tip unpredictably in an instant into drug-fed random violence.

After 20 odd years (some of them very odd) on the fringes of Westminster and working with people from various think-tanks, still feeling like a tourist in wonkdom, I'm convinced of this: sometimes it doesn't matter how good the idea is, what you don't do is publish it in the Guardian saying 'here's a policy suggestion: we could try doing this to people'.