While the Home Office’s Safer Street Summer initiative runs until September 30, the main reason for the campaign against anti-social behaviour in town centres was nuisance by children over the summer holidays. Now that the children are back at school and are the teachers’ problem, we can offer a verdict on whether it was a success, says Professional Security magazine editor Mark Rowe.
Briefly to recap, the initiative was launched by the then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (since shifted to Foreign Secretary) to run from June 30 until the end of September. Its focus; reducing town centre criminality, shop theft, street crime and anti-social behaviour. It was led by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs, mainly Labour ones since the elections of May 2024), supported by local partners such as councils, schools, health services, business and bus companies and others in transport. Police could use some £66m in hotspot policing funding from the Home Office. As that suggests, police were not spreading themselves everywhere, but in ‘hotspots’ – 20 places in London by the Met; 28 in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Incidentally, that does show the value in businesses reporting each crime, no matter how small or troublesome it is to get through to the police; because what isn’t recorded does not exist to the authorities.
The campaign duly gave PCCs chance to make visits and gain publicity about what good goes on in their area. However, one cannot shake the feeling that some places missed out altogether; Staffordshire for example did not even have any places listed on the Home Office list of towns and parts of cities that would see any ‘Safer Streets’ action. A regular public-facing worker in a public building told me how they were glad of the end of the summer holiday last week, which was their most troublesome in terms of anti-social youths for the 30 years of their experience. Similar trouble – of boys, and girls, entering the building and being rude and provocative – happens in term and half-term holidays. While not new, what was new was the setting fire to grass outside, put out by the fire brigade; and a youth walking on a flat roof (also in the building is a register office). This prompted the calling of the police. Typically police or a local government warden appear and shepherd the trouble-makers away; there never seems any outcome or consequence. Quite the opposite of the ‘blitz‘ trumpeted by Yvette Cooper and the Home Office.
To add what I witnessed; at Barnsley bus and rail interchange (where last summer I witnessed a typical scene of security guards shepherding off the site gobby youths with nothing better to do and nowhere worthwhile to go) a boy did wheelies on his bicycle on the walkway between the railway and bus station; and in the Oxfam bookshop in Bath, a boy and girl held the shopkeeper in conversation, first asking if he had any books for sale for £1, while admitting they didn’t read. Their time-wasting was actually pathetic; they evidently had nothing better to do with their Sunday or their lives.
Yvette Cooper launched Safer Summer with the English Football League at Derby County Football Club; a sign that the Government was looking to football to occupy bored youths usefully. Again, to labour the point, evidently far from all youth was reached, all of the time. Labour chose to link the launch to its Tackling Retail Crime Together Strategy; and to Neighbourhood Policing. To take them in turn; retail crime is only incidentally to do with ‘safer streets’, because as a recent front page Daily Express campaign against shoplifting identified, shop theft is by organised criminals, drug addicts stealing to pay for their addiction, besides pensioners and others simply to survive. The retail crime strategy admitted that crime against shops is ‘unprecedented’ and would take more than ‘hotspot’ occasional sightings of police, the tactic of the ‘safer streets summer’. In Sussex, the PCC Katy Bourne, a national lead on crime against business, is trialling tagging of prolific shop thieves; more in the October edition of Professional Security magazine, and on this link. She said ‘I have become impatient waiting for Government to make a decision so I have, instead, decided to pioneer this project with Sussex Police myself’.
As for Neighbourhood Policing, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary’s latest annual state of policing report noted the Labour Government’s commitment of 13,000 more officers, staff and volunteers in neighbourhood policing roles by 2029. “But with the continued financial challenges that most forces are facing, many chief constables believe this funding won’t be enough,” HMIC added. In policing, as in other fields of public service, we might add, it’s not all about money; the report noted: ‘In too many cases, we found forces’ commitment to tackling anti-social behaviour was undermined by difficulties in sharing data, which was compounded by external organisations with inadequate IT systems. Forces lacked sufficient analytical expertise’.
As ever, detailed operations do bring tangible results. To state what might be obvious, you get out what you put in. In Tyne and Wear for example, Nexus the public transport operator carried out Operation Coastwatch. Erika Allen, Quality Health Safety Security and Environment (QHSSE) Director at Nexus, said: “It’s great to see Operation Coastwatch having such a positive impact in lowering crime and anti-social behaviour and the hard work on this will continue.
“As the operator of the Metro system, we have a key part to play in supporting the police and our local authority partners in keeping the public safe and secure as we provide Metro services into North Tyneside.
“This builds on the work we have already done to improve safety and security on the transport network, including the roll out of our dedicated security teams, investment in new CCTV, and the launch of our text message alert system. Metro is a safe system to travel on and we are determined to keep it that way.”
Photo by Mark Rowe: Barnsley town centre, weekday morning, left to right, Barnsley town warden and South Yorkshire PCSO (police community safety officer).
