Managing resources and engaging users: evidence and experiences from policing and health care

1. Managing resources and engaging users: evidence and experiences from policing and health care Community engagement Nick Fyfe (SIPR & University of Dundee) Assessing methods of community engagement in policing

2. Assessing community engagement in policing • The case for community engagement in general… • Community definitions of need, problems and solutions may be different from those put forward by service planners and providers; • Community knowledge is an important resource and widens the pool of experience and expertise that professionals can draw upon • Community participation gives local residents the opportunity to develop skills and networks that they need to address social exclusion; • Active participation of local residents is essential to improved democratic and service accountability and demonstrates the exercise of citizenship.

3. and the case for community engagement in policing… • ‘Social order’ results more from informal social control processes than from formal social control mechanisms, such as policing; • Therefore it is important to stimulate citizen participation in problem solving activities; • Citizen participation helps identify problems the police may not be aware of and makes communities feel that the police are responsive to their concerns; • This is likely to increase confidence and trust and improve police-community relations; • This in turn can result in a reduction in real crime rates, disorder and ASB, and fear of crime….

4. Defining community engagement in policing • The process of enabling the participation of citizens and communities in policing …ranging from providing information and reassurance, to empowering them to identify and implement solutions to local problems and influence strategic priorities and decisions (Myhill, 2006)

5. The practice of community engagement and evidence of impact • Strategic elements: Re-orient operations, shift in geographic focus, focus on pro-active prevention focus; • Tactical elements: positive interactions; partnership and problem-solving • Organisational elements: decentralisation, changes in performance management

6. The practice of community engagement and evidence of impact

7. Key challenges for implementing effective community engagement in policing • Tailoring engagement to communities’ needs and preferences • Organisational culture change • Measurement of performance • Capacity building and training within the police • Capacity building and training within communities • Police-community partnerships

8. A typology for community engagement: Arnstein’s ladder of participation From: Arnstein, S. (1969) A Ladder of Citizen Participation.

9. A typology of community engagement for policing From: Myhill, A. (2006) Community engagement in policing. Lessons from the literature

10. The case against community engagement? The ‘unbearable lightness of community’ • ‘We invest [community] with significant political hopes at great potential peril. It would certainly be nice if one could conclude otherwise, if more romanticized notions of community togetherness and empowerment actually had more resonance and possibility. A more clear-eyed assessment points us in the opposite direction, toward a necessary scepticism about the promise of community policing and other efforts to increase localized self-governance….’ • ‘Community is unbearably light: it cannot bear the political weight of projects like community policing, its voice is not loudly heard by state agencies like the police… Community cannot be expected to be a robust force for political action [and] cannot relate in any simple fashion to the police…’ • Herbert (2006)

11. Managing resources and engaging users: evidence and experiences from policing and health care Managing resources Huw Davies (SDHI & University of St Andrews) Evidence for improving services