We aim to feature CSAS (Community Safety Accreditation Scheme) throughout 2022 and we start here with an interview with the trainer Bob Betts of Elite Academy.
He’s given CSAS training to local government and other takers of CSAS and also offers CSAS officers. For example in Norwich during the pandemic, officers carried out covid compliance patrols. CSAS does not have to be provided by private security firms; Bob reports that councils are putting their civil enforcement staff through the training, for them to use some police powers.
To recap briefly, CSAS has been around for quite a while – it came into force under the Police Reform Act 2002. Like others in the field, Bob feels that CSAS has been under-rated; but reckons that could be about to change. Police – of senior rank, and on the ground – may feel wary of embracing CSAS, feeling that it encroaches on what they do, and ought to do, as constables with arrest powers. CSAS, though, as the organisers of the scheme nationally Police CPI will say – and there’s an equivalent scheme for the railways – is for ‘providing an additional uniformed presence in communities and on the rail network to assist in reducing criminality and anti-social behaviour [ASB]’. In other words, to assist the police and not replace them.
In the March print edition of Professional Security there is an example, of a CSAS traffic marshal directing traffic during a Brentford FC Premier League home match – pictured – as part of a policing operation on a busy Saturday evening in west London. Marshalling is not only needed at such static events, whether to keep traffic moving or to get visitors moving as they leave a car park after an event; Bob mentions the Great North Run, and cycling events, that need a plan for marshals to close and re-open roads as the runners or riders pass.
The paradox is that CSAS like innumerable other things is nationwide, and to become CSAS-accredited you have to follow a bureaucratic process, to get staff vetted and trained and signed off by a chief constable; but CSAS is not applied consistently. It seems that in each town or city, CSAS needs someone with the enthusiasm or vision – not things necessarily associated with bureaucrats – to see the benefit of it, and to convince enough people to pay for it, and get it rolling.
In Norwich, that might be Bob Betts. He is hoping to arrange a meeting to gauge interest in the city from businesses and business groups for a patrol service by accredited CSAS patrollers; locals, who would know their neighbourhoods and both feel a community pride in looking after a locality, and help make a sense of community by deterring crime and ASB, and making locals feel reassured. Something similar is already happening, in Plymouth and York city centres, to name two examples featured on the Police CPI website.
More in the April print edition of Professional Security magazine.
Bob was most recently featured in the January print edition as part of coverage of the National Association for Healthcare Security (NAHS) conference in Birmingham where Bob was an exhibitor.
