Police handling of anti-social behaviour must be reviewed with ‘urgency’

Police forces must take anti-social behaviour seriously and recognise the impact it has on communities, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has said.

Denis O’Connor’s speech coincided with the announcement of the new My Police website going live last week.

The data on the website indicates that police are failing to properly record information on harassment, vandalism and verbal abuse.

There is currently no agreed operating framework on anti-social behaviour that draws together the best that is known about how police systems, the impact of anti-social behaviour on individuals and public confidence interact.

“The police database of information about anti-social behaviour incidents is inadequate and should be improved as a matter of urgency,” Mr O’Connor said.

As part of its assessments, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) carried out reality testing on police systems and looked at two issues: police systems for dealing with repeat victims and the impact on these people.

The initial assessment indicates that police systems vary in their ability to identify repeat victims and vulnerable victims. Over half cannot identify repeat victims via automatic IT systems and rely on manual trawls. Almost all forces are unable to automatically identify victims who have previously been deemed vulnerable. Consequently, officers attending reports of anti-social behaviour may not be aware of the previous history. This is likely to affect the way the incident is dealt with.

“Anti-social behaviour is one of the top issues raised by the public. It deeply troubles them,” said Mr O’Connor. “The public struggles to see the difference between anti-social behaviour and crime. That’s not surprising – the boundaries between the two are blurred, even for police forces.

“Repeated anti-social behaviour, particularly where a solution looks unachievable, can blight people’s lives. We believe this has repercussions beyond the individual and that anti-social behaviour does significant harm to confidence in communities and fear of crime. At a future stage we intend to look at the comparative impact of anti-social behaviour and crime.”

Some 3.6 million reports of anti-social behaviour were made in 2008/09. By comparison there were 4.6 million crimes reported in the same period.

HMIC spoke to 765 people across all force areas in England and Wales who have reported suffering repeated anti-social behaviour. Four out of five said anti-social behaviour was having a high impact on their quality of life but 59 per cent said they were satisfied with the way the police dealt with their report of antisocial behaviour.

Mr O’Connor said that attending a report of anti-social behaviour was vital to maintaining public confidence in the police. Of the 23 per cent who had no one attend their report of anti-social behaviour, 93 per cent said they were dissatisfied with the explanation given.

“Our work has confirmed that repeat victims are less likely to be confident in the police and in the system in general. As confidence reduces, reports of ASB also reduce,” added Mr O’Connor.
Over time, this could mean that forces would have less understanding of the issues in their area and increasingly lack the data to target key problems. The incident rate (ie, the reports) alone is therefore not a good measure of performance.

Working with Professor Martin Innes of the Cardiff University Police Science Institute, who has a background in this field, and market research company Ipsos MORI, HMIC will be looking at opportunities to develop a framework to assess anti-social behaviour performance in the near future. The purpose of this will be to integrate the best research on victims and ideas as to how the police can develop a framework to operationalise that knowledge.

Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) lead on anti-social behaviour, Assistant Chief Constable Simon Edens, said: “Chief officers recognise that what pe