Residents of high-crime housing estates, youth workers, teachers and housing managers should be trained to tackle anti-social behavior as part of a “Big Society” drive, according to a report published yesterday.
The report says the approach, which echoes British Prime Minister David Cameron’s general election rhetoric, could be adopted in the face of spending cuts and a potential reduction in police officer numbers.
The Royal Society of Arts report says Britain is seen as having one of the worst anti-social behavior problems in Europe, and that its citizens are far less likely to intervene to tackle problems than their continental peers.
The report by Ben Rogers, an Royal Society of Arts visiting fellow and former Downing Street policy strategist, says that while 60 percent of the German public say they feel confident in tackling anti-social behavior, such as young teenagers vandalizing bus stops, this confidence falls to 30 percent in Britain.
Rogers says New Labour’s almost obsessive “top-down” approach to tackling low-level crime and disorder, which involved investing heavily in neighborhood policing and issuing anti-social behavior orders, had only limited success. This is borne out, he says, by a recent survey of anti-social behavior across six western European countries that found the UK was regarded as having the most serious problem. However, the report does say that this outlook could have more to do with media coverage than direct experience.
The report — The Woolwich Model: How citizens can tackle anti-social behaviour — says the disappearance of such people as caretakers and park-keepers, a growing uncertainty over the rules about admonishing other people’s children and a belief that the system is weighted against those who “take a stand,” have led to a public retreat from day-to-day intervention.
The report, which suggests ministers look to public-service workers, volunteers and residents to play a more active role in local policing, draws on a model developed in the 1870s by the early pioneers of first aid in Woolwich, south London. The idea is for the introduction of courses in community safety skills focusing on aspects such as self protection and restraint, “reading” a situation and defusing it.
Teaching self-defense skills could make some liberals uneasy, Rogers says, but adds that those abilities are important in giving people the confidence to intervene.
Rogers, who is an associate fellow of the Institute of Public Policy Research and of Demos, says that this approach might be seen as a vigilante’s charter, but adds that community safety training would ensure those involved acted responsibly within the law.
He says that though it was right for the police to deal with obviously criminal types of anti-social behavior, such as drug dealing, there was still significant scope for the public to intervene in less serious situations.
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