Neighbourhood Policing
Merseyside Joint Branch Board is fully committed to a neighbourhood policing style that engages with, and empowers the local community through partnership arrangements to deliver policing services. We believe that this style of policing is the only effective way of providing public re-assurance and tackling anti social behaviour, which blights the lives of our communities.
The backbone of Neighbourhood Policing is a Policing Team, which may include a mix from the extended police family in addition to Constables and Sergeants. It is our stated position that a Police Inspector should always be in charge of and lead this policing team. To effectively engage with the public at Neighbourhood level it is essential that a consistent team is posted to and remains in a Neighbourhood and abstractions are kept to an absolute minimum.
The Federation philosophy of Neighbourhood Policing is about engaging with the public, identifying and prosecuting offenders, and providing long-term solutions to neighbourhood problems. However, the police alone cannot provide those solutions, and the Neighbourhood Policing Team must provide support to the community, giving them the confidence to have ownership, and take their responsibility for local policing of their own areas.
However, the delivery of Neighbourhood Policing is incredibly resource intensive and creates tensions and divisions between the delivery of local services and other essential policing services, which can only be tackled through a centralised and corporate approach. Such policing demands include tackling major and organised crime, policing the leisure and entertainment culture, and specialist policing such as road policing, which cannot effectively be delivered from Neighbourhoods.
For Neighbourhood policing to be delivered successfully, then the whole of the Police Service needs to be adequately resourced and funded. Without this funding Neighbourhood Officers will be continually abstracted to other policing duties. Nor can they adequately fulfil their duties of providing long-term solutions, or empowerment of their communities, when they are too often dragged by calls for service into reactive response policing. This fails to deliver an adequate service to the public and prevents the public from having confidence in the long term support of the police to tackle neighbourhood problems. It also fails to deliver reduction in demands upon the police service through a problem solving approach.
Merseyside Joint Branch Board believes that the success of Neighbourhood Policing is based on a proper analysis of workloads and clarity about the roles police officers and the extended police family. This should provide a resource model where there will always be sufficient officers to deliver the full range of Policing Services as identified. We will continuously lobby all key stakeholders to achieve sufficient funding to deliver this aim. Whilst the Service should always be adequately funded from central and local taxation, the Joint Branch Board believes that additional funding should be raised through levies on the entertainment industry, which we contend do not adequately fund the policing demand that in turn creates many of the abstractions from the Neighbourhood Teams. Further and additional funding should also be raised through the confiscation of the proceeds of organised crime, which should always be ploughed back into operational policing. Whilst steps have been taken in this direction we believe that there is further scope for future and greater expansion in this area and any barriers that exist to this should continue to be removed through legislation.
