Risk, resilience and recovery: 3Rs

A recent study on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by an eminent academic, Dr Martin Innes, has called into question the homogenised rollout of neighbourhood policing.

According to Dr Martin Innes, who led the research for the National Reassurance Policing Programme, neighbourhood policing now needs a more concerted focus based on the nature of each individual area.

Should a one-size-fits-all national model continue or should different strategies with varying levels of police involvement be aimed at communities with different needs?

Neighbourhood security and urban change: Risk, resilience and recovery challenges, to some extent, the Government`s Respect agenda focus upon identifying a small number of the most `problematic` individuals and conducting targeted and intensive interventions with them. According to Dr Innes, this approach may produce improvements in a small number of neighbourhoods, but is unlikely to produce improvements in security across the majority of neighbourhoods as it misunderstands the problem.

“My diagnosis is that at the moment the police focus is largely internally directed trying to establish what organisational processes and systems to put in place, rather than an external focus upon precisely what policing can change in neighbourhoods and how. I think that this fails to grasp some of the really profound challenges presented by the demands of taking neighbourhood delivery of services seriously.

“For if the police are dealing with neighbourhoods it is abundantly clear that individual neighbourhoods within the same BCU and force will have very different needs and demands.”

In broad terms, Dr Innes agrees that the idea of neighbourhood policing is right in terms of being able to influence fear of crime and public confidence in the police. However, he feels that the current success of the neighbourhood policing programme may be timed as a ”fortunate coincidence”, implemented at a time when crime rates are going down or are at least stable, giving it the space in which it can develop and be successful over a longer time period.

He said: “Correlation is not coordination; just because crime rates happen to be stable or going down at the time when neighbourhood policing is being implemented, it does not mean that the impact that’s happening on crime is a result of neighbourhood policing.”

Dr Innes’ view at this current time is that the police are overly focused upon the development of organisational processes and systems with regards to neighbourhood policing, but are not really thinking in a forward and searching sense about how precisely neighbourhood policing is going to work.

“That’s where the research that we’ve been doing comes in, which is how and what is it reasonable to expect neighbourhood policing and the actions of other neighbourhood services to do; what is it that they should be doing and how should they think about their role?”

As an alternative, Dr Innes proposes a framework that takes into account that neighbourhoods are starting from different points on a continuum in terms of the nature of their needs and wants and what are the implications of that in terms of neighbourhood policing? He said: “There are three pathways that neighbourhood policing and other neighbourhood services need to adopt. The implementation needs to be matched to the needs each neighbourhood. In some areas it’s about targeting what are functioning as risk factors, in other neighbourhoods you need to be building resilience and in other neighbourhoods you need to be finding ways to try and trigger recovery.”

The ‘3Rs’ framework establishes that the principal logic of the interventions can be divided up into three key types:

• In some neighbourhoods the focus must explicitly be on tackling the signal crimes and disorders that function as risk factors to the local order.
• In other neighbourhoods what is required is the police working in ways that builds the resilience of n