On the 14th of December 2010 I observed a meeting of the Cambridge Community Safety Partnership.

Interesting Points

• The police have caught and bailed five “medium scale handlers” who have each been selling 20-30 stolen bikes per week online. The police think people like this are responsible for most bike theft in Cambridge. I think it is great news these people have been caught and will be facing the courts.
• Cambridge’s Magistrate’s Court is now classed as merely a “Hearing Centre” having lost all its support staff.
• “Legal highs” in the form of stimulant based drugs called “ERIC 3″ and “Diablo” are in use in Cambridge. Diablo is making people ill.
• The city’s cycle crime peak this autumn was higher autumn of the year before.
• The group’s plans to drop burglary and robbery as city wide police priorities were not directly discussed.
• Cambridge Street Pastors offer hair bands, blankets, loan of a phone and water as well as flip-flops.
• Burglary statistics reported to the committee were relatively high, but the police dismissed them as “old hat”, they are expecting the effect of their operation to arrest the city’s known burglars (Operation Northwood) to be reflected in future statistics.

Meeting report

The Community Safety Partnership’s key responsibility is to set the city wide policing priorities for Cambridge. It has technically met in public since February 2010, though this was the first public meeting I have been aware of in advance.

Before the meeting started, as required under the committee’s published procedures, I sought and obtained permission from the chair to take notes using my laptop (I also used a pen and paper, and live-tweeted the meeting, neither of which required permission).

The meeting started with introductions, and unusually for a public meeting of this nature the members of the public present, were asked to identify ourselves (there were two of us). I noted the unusual nature of the request, but complied.

Before the meeting the chair Chief Inspector Sargent offered to waive the public speaking rules and allow me to ask a question if I wanted to. I suggested that when the public question slot was reached I would like to explain why I had not submitted any questions. The chair’s invitation saved me having to heckle.

I spoke to say:

For a functional public questions slot the committee needs to publish its meeting papers in advance. [Public questions are only permitted on the business in-front of the committee, the public aren’t going to be able to formulate questions if they can’t find out what is going to be discussed].

Only the agenda, not the reports, have been published on the partnership’s page on the city council website.

The chair was been slightly disbelieving of my report of this when I spoke to him before the meeting. I have the published document in front of me and the agenda only is present; it is a single document; a 29 KB PDF; far too small for all the documents are embedded within it. No icons (embedded links) as appear in the chair’s copy of the agenda, are present in the published document.

My mentioning of the phrase “29 kb PDF” was clearly far too technical for the police officer chairing the meeting who asked if I was saying there was a technical problem due to the size of the committee papers.

The secretary stated he submitted the full document for publication, and blamed Cambridge City Council officers for failing to place it online properly.

(Later, outside the meeting the committee’s secretary visited his office and checked the council’s website, confirming my report was accurate. He told me about the difficulties he had with the Cambridge City Council web-team refusing to post the meeting papers online as separate documents. I suggested he try and get the meeting listed on the council’s “Modern Gov” system which they use for all their meetings even though it isn’t technically a city council meeting. I suggested listing the partnership’s meetings on other bodies’ meeting lists too, eg. the County Council and Police Authority).

While on the subject the chair stated: “The whole purpose of the Community Safety Partnership is to make it more accessible to the public.” (I don’t know what “it” is but it might be the city wide priority setting). He said the committee would have more discussion of public involvement later when discussing future venues for meetings. He said he wanted to adopt something like the city council’s area committees.

This came as a surprise to me as I thought the Community Safety Partnership was not intended to be a public facing committee, but a way for various public services in the committee to co-ordinate their work on common policing related aims.

There were no pre-submitted public questions; and the other individual present in the public seating did say anything when invited to do so.

Street Pastors

The meeting heard a presentation from the Cambridge Street Pastors.

• The street pastors have thrown 8,000 bottles into the city’s bins
• They offer hair bands, blankets and water as well as flip-flops.
• They say city centre trouble is on a downward trend
• The like to “appear” when people need help, not when they don’t
• They can make a phone call for people who’ve lost their phones
• They say police incident statistics are down on the dates / times when pastors patrol.
• The pastors are a volunteer core. 35-40 percent are women and they are trying to reach 50-50
• They have at least one man and one woman on team

Cllr Bick, as a councillor representing Market Ward, where much of the activity happens, commended what the pastors are doing. He said the city council might want to fund their work (they didn’t mention anything about needing more money!)

Performance Report Q2 2010-11 (till September 2001)

It was reported that there had been an increase in violent crime when comparing Q2 with Q1 but that was consistent with previous year’s rise in the summer. The committee were also told that serious violent crimes were down though, so overall the situation was violent crime in the city is “not out of control”.

Acquisitive Robbery and burglary were reported to both be at higher levels than previous quarters and last year. Personal robbery was reported to be about average compared to a “family group” of similar places Cambridge’s performance is benchmarked against. Burglary though sees Cambridge ranked 5th highest in “family group” and the statistics reported show an increase.

Cycle crime peak this autumn higher than last autumn.

Reports on Priorities

Alcohol related ASB

An Addenbrooke’s consultant trying is to improve information sharing, police, hospitals, ambulance.

Police had invested significant resources into Monday night “international student night”; but this extra work comes to an end next Monday. It is not an option to fund additional patrols next year; have to re-jig police resources instead.

Burglary

Inspector Kerridge started saying the statistics for Q2 were now “old hat” given we’re almost at the end of Q3. He drew attention to the “areas of concern” section of a document on burglary, saying we are not going to achieve the 2007 baseline level target.

About 200 burglaries per quarter are reported in Cambridge with no massive changes across year.

A significant reduction in the North of the City was mentioned.

Six events are to be run in key hot spot areas by the end of the period (April 2011). The police are concentrating on “target hardening”.

Cllr Kevin Wilkins asked why the burglary figures were up this year on last?

The police response was that: “We will see what the effect is of operation Northwood; that takes time; and that this year is quite consistent with last year.”

Mike Soper, the officer responsible for statistics said “last year and year before” levels of burglary in Cambridge were very high, near the top of the “family group”, and the partnership had been looking to bring back in line with peers. He said he was “not sure how realistic that is now”.

Police Inspector Kerridge said he couldn’t see why the target had been fixed at 2007/8 levels when that was an exceptional performance year. Going back to those levels will be a huge undertaking he told the partnership

Pedal Cycle Theft

Inspector Kerridge said a huge amount of work being done. He’s contacted other partnerships, but they don’t have same issues we have in Cambridge. There is work being done to identify hotspots, as with dwelling burglary. Looking over 3-5 years of history to identify the problem areas and doing detailed work there. Cycle crime adopted as city priority for last 3 months, so additional focus across whole organisation.

Detections for cycle crime higher than in memory, lots more people being brought to justice.

Cllr Bick said as cycle crime was going on at such an industrial scale, there must be trading and dealing which can be targeted.

Inspector Kerridge replied saying the police had never got to the heart of if there were one or two people in lorry responsible for the bulk of cycle thefts. He said that in the last couple of years there had been a rise of “e-comerce”. The meeting was told the police had now got five or so “medium scale handlers” who were moving 20-30 stolen bikes per week online on bail awaiting trial. Inspector Kerridge reported that the police were now “finding these people all over the place” and that “if you add up all them they account for most of the thefts”. The Inspector stated the police: “will pin charges on those individuals”. He added that what Cambridgeshire police is tackling is a regional / national issue with bikes stolen in Cambridge turning up in Norfolk.

Domestic Violence

The committee was told that statistics here were very dependent on the “threshold” of reporting, and it was important to make sure there was measuring like-for-like within the “family group”.

Change took place in December 2010; so we will see reduction from then in recorded domestic violence as a result of change in recording.

The report also stated efficiency by working together was being achieved. Administration referrals, between various services eg. police / children’s services has been reduced. Previously lots of admin effort had been used up in all bodies involved dealing with referrals between them.

Personal Robbery

It was reported this is “back to the level expected”.

Currently the statistics for the year show the current year about ten offences down on last year over the year.

Lots of positive work with licensees, link between alcohol related violence and robberies.

Plus over a few days there was someone stealing cash after people took money out at cash points; the individual caught and taken to court.

Reducing Re-offending

Relevant bodies has been merged into a “offender management unit”. The officer making the report stated he was “pleased with day to day operations” and the unit had 26 “clients” in the city.

One offender supported offered to mentor some of the other people; but the officer noted there were risks associated with jumping to that too soon.

Drugs and Alcohol Task Group

No one was present to present the report, but a paper had been prepared for the meeting by lead officer Vickie Crompton.

She reported to the committee that the Cambridgeshire Child and Adolescent Substance Use Service (CASUS) had told the group they had heard of a couple of new legal highs “on the scene” in Cambridge. These are stimulant based drugs called “ERIC 3” and “Diablo”. The report states: “It has been reported that Diablo is making people very sick and they are ending up at hospital. CASUS, the Cambridgeshire Drug and Alcohol Action team and the police will closely monitor the situation.

Chief Inspector Sargent who was chairing the meeting said he had not previously been aware of this problem.

Community Safety Plan 2011-14: Update on consultation

Cambridge City Council officer Lynda Kilkelly gave an oral update on the progress of the consultation on the new priorities.

This is the exercise I have written about previously where city councillors are being asked by the partnership to endorse dropping burglary and robbery as city wide police priorities for Cambridge and to select three new priorities from a short list of five.

Lynda Kilkelly reported the South Area committee had made a choice; and that the North Area committee had not taking the view that individual councillors ought respond to the survey independently if they wanted to.

Lynda Kilkelly reported the consultation had been opened to the public, via postcards left at area committees, and it was being publicised via “Cambridge Matters”. She had no statistics on responses to-date but said there was “not a huge response”.

Cllr Bick asked why the logic behind selecting the shortlisted priorities wasn’t being made available to the public and councillors. He said all that was being offered was “titles”. Lynda Kilkelly said the consultation had been started in a hurry and there hadn’t been time to do it properly. She said the consultation’s webpage had now been improved to add “a paragraph” under each title which readers can click to reveal.

I have viewed these paragraphs, most of which are a single sentence, and don’t really go much beyond a title. For example the expansion of “Re-offending” is to “A large amount of crime is committed by a small number of offenders so tackling re-offending impacts on all areas of crime, particularly serious acquisitive crime.”

Mr Wilkins said that while he was not at the North Area Committee he had heard that councillors there took the view that all five appeared sensible. The council officer who presented the report to the North Area Committee said councillors there had asked the partnership to consider which priorities they were best placed to address.

My view of the North Area Committee meeting was that councillors rejected what they were being asked to do and refused to participate, as a committee, in the process. As usual no clear reasons were given by councillors but during debate a number appeared unhappy about removing burglary and robbery.

Funding

There was a brief report on future funding for the partnership. In summary it is “uncertain”.

Future Meetings of the Partnership

Members of the committee discussed trying to make the committee more accessible to the public.

The chair stated that I was the first member of the public to have attended the Community Safety Partnership. I suspect this is inaccurate as Cllr Bick told the West/Central area committee that he had attended his first meeting of the partnership before he had been formally appointed to it. There was also a “member of the public” sitting next to me in the public seating.

The proposal they were discussing was to hold two of their six meetings a year in the evening, and to hold one in the North and one in the South of the city.

It was pointed out that members of the public probably wouldn’t want to come and listen to a meeting jut handling “business as usual” (especially if on turning up they would expect to be then kicked out for 20-30 minutes when the members went into secret session; meetings which are public-friendly have the secret bits at the end).

I was asked for my view; I suggested that to better reach the public they could take the interesting bit of the meeting – which I said was the update on the city wide police priorities and incorporating it into area committees. I pointed out that councillors and members of the public at areas committees often ask about the city wide priorities and don’t currently get answers.

Cllr Bick spoke against my idea saying that area committee agendas were too full as it was. (I agree with him, but the getting occasional updates on the progress against the city wide police priorities is the kind of thing which ought be in them). A member of the committee oddly pointed out that a whole two hour Community Safety Partnership meeting wouldn’t fit within an area committee.

County Councillor Wilkins who is the representative of the Police Authority on the Community Safety Partnership said he liked my idea of chopping up the business of the CSP and “putting some bits to the area committees”.

Citizen Focus Champion

Cllr Wilkins appears to be the partnership’s Citizen Focus Champion. He spoke about a survey asking about the confidence people have in their police and local councils. He said there had been a “fall off in that measure” in Cambridge and asked if anyone had any ideas as to what could be behind that.

One committee member suggested the appearance of areas counted most to such feelings of confidence eg. if there were abandoned cars on the streets such metrics would fall.

The committee then decided the media were to blame. Chief Inspector Sargent reported the police had been working with the Cambridge News and the Cambridge First to try and encourage them to put out balanced messages. He said that when the papers report crime, and when they report on police operations like Operation Northwood against burglars then people start to feel as if they live in a crime-ridden area.

A member of the committee asked if there was a “national feeling of doom and gloom” or if the Cambridge results were anomalous. Mr Wilkins said the problem was only within Cambridge.

Magistrates Court

The magistrate member of the committee said nothing until the “any other business” section of the meeting when he reported that Cambridge Magistrates Court is now no longer designated as a “Magistrates Court” but just a “Hearing Centre”. (The new court building only started to hear cases in October 2008, and was officially opened in September 2009.

The magistrate explained this meant “all staff” had moved to Peterborough and that their “clients” (he used the word apparently seriously) would no longer for example be able to leave the court and pay their fines, or arrange to pay their fines straight away by speaking to someone face-to face; instead they would have to phone court workers based in Peterborough. He told the committee this “could be quite difficult”.