With the civil enforcement tools, it's on the balance of probability. It doesn't need to meet a criminal threshold so it's invaluable to us, because a lot of ASB doesn't involve crime, but it's that persistent drip, drip, drip effect. It's the impact it has on somebody and before you could use these sort of tools, it was people had to sort of learn to live with it, but they don't now.
A lot of problems start before police are ever involved and by the time it gets to police involvement, you're sort of looking at a bigger problem.
We prefer early intervention and prevention than enforcement. Early intervention may be looking at support networks, for example, a young person trying to divert their behaviour into diversionary schemes.
We look at the support mechanisms around vulnerability and that is whether they're the offender or the victim. So we take a harm-centred approach to everyone that's involved in that case and ensure that they are adequately receiving the support they should be.
MAVIS is our case management system for anti-social behaviour and low-level vulnerability, so the OSARA model is built into that system. So every time an officer uses that system, they're going through each stage of the process. They have an objective of what they want to achieve, how and when, and then it takes them through the scanning process, where they start to look at what data they have. They may call in the partner agencies to provide data as well. Then the analysis stage is looking at the data, seeing whether there are any patterns, any peak times – for example, days of the week. And then they start to look at their responses, so what are they going to do to solve that problem? Once the responses are actioned, they will then come back to the assessment to look at what has worked? What has worked well? What would we do differently? What have we learned from the process and what can we share as best practice?
A lot of the time you're not going to fix it, but there's a lot we can do with OSARA to be able to say, ‘Right there's gaps here, there's gaps here, there’s gaps here we need to fill. This is causing this. This is causing this.’ And it gives us that way of thinking logically and really looking at a problem-solving approach to be able to say who else can be involved. We look at everything holistically with the OSARA model, rather than ‘We need that to stop now’. The likelihood is then we're going to get repeat offenders and repeat victims. So we use that to say, how can we do this now and give that resolution that has got legs, rather than, ‘There's a sticking plaster and it's solved it for today’.
A lot of it’s the emphasis on, ‘We're giving you the opportunity to change and to stop this behaviour’. And we always give them that, with words of advice or a letter of expectation. We would outline the behaviour that is not acceptable and it gives them an outline of behaviours that are acceptable, by things they can do to avoid it. And that's giving them the opportunity to say, ‘Take this, we urge you to take this opportunity to stop and think of how your behaviour is impacting on your neighbour or the community’. That's been crucial to the way we've worked as a force and a team, because it's giving people the opportunity not to be criminalised.
Until you can understand the problem and maybe some of the reasons why it's happening, you can't prevent it. Look at the bigger picture, so don't just concentrate on the offender and the enforcement side of the offender. Look at everybody and what they all need as individuals, and look at the location. So does it need to have improved lighting? Does there need to be improved security? So rather than just from a police perspective, think enforcement, we've got tools and powers. Look at everything before you get to that stage, so that you try and prevent rather than enforce.
I think it's really important that our neighbourhood police teams have got the capacity to achieve what we want them to work towards, which is long-term problem solving. By giving them the skills, you've given them the capability. But what we need to ensure is they've got the time and space to pursue those pure neighbourhood activities, to allow them to achieve problem solving and the other activities. Is it achievable all the time? I think we're realistic that, you know, when there's a major incident and we need our neighbourhood police teams to help with cordons or with house-to-house inquiries, then yes, that's all hands on deck. But generally, we will try and give them time and space to achieve those neighbourhood objectives.
