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Summary of Recommendations
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland ( HMICS) has examined how Scottish forces take account of the public's views when setting their priorities. This choice of topic arose initially through consultation with our stakeholders. It was subsequently further endorsed by the Scottish Parliament's Justice Committee, following its inquiry report on the effective use of police resources 1.
The inspection focused on the following areas:
- forces' strategic approach to public consultation to inform priorities;
- the key processes by which this is achieved; and
- the availability of resources and skills to carry out consultation, including partnership working.
Our aim in making the following recommendations is to foster a more direct and genuinely consultative approach to harnessing public opinion. This can be done, we argue, by exploiting the ways in which the police routinely consult the public in the course of their job. We also acknowledge the increasing focus on joint working, through local community planning partnerships and, more recently, single outcome agreements ( SOAs). In our opinion it is precisely at the local level that consultation should be targeted. At the time of writing, approved guidance on how consultation to inform SOAs should be conducted was still being developed by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities ( COSLA). In the meantime we believe that a more cohesive and co-ordinated approach to consultation in forces would help to ensure that, among other things, standards, support and good practice are shared.
Recommendation 1: That all forces develop a consultation strategy or reconsider their existing one, in light of the findings of this report. In particular, strategies must be clear about the purpose and use of all consultation going on throughout forces and their divisions and, without being overly prescriptive, should identify mechanisms for support, guidance and oversight.
Recommendation 2: That, in order to make it easier to plan, co-ordinate and rationalise exercises, each force establish a central database for maintaining the details of its consultation activities. Forces should also consider to what extent this information could be made available to all staff, the police service as a whole, partner agencies and the public.
Recommendation 3: That forces evaluate their consultation exercises as standard practice. All consultation plans should include a section describing how forces intend to evaluate their activities, while general guidance and/or sources of further guidance on conducting evaluations should be contained in force consultation strategies.
Recommendation 4: That forces move away from centrally-managed postal surveys to more direct, face-to-face consultation in local communities. In seeking alternative methods, forces should consider the merits of models such as the public reassurance strategy, and the value of community intelligence that can be derived from local community meetings and events.
For the purpose of this inspection we defined the public as including not just lay members of the public but also wider external stakeholders, such as partner agencies, businesses, local and central government. Our primary focus was on how the views of the public can influence priority setting, either directly or through representative bodies or organisations. Furthermore, when talking about territorial areas in forces we have used the term division to denote divisions, local command areas and lower level territorial policing units.
In a previous report 2 we examined the way in which forces monitor and respond to users' views of the service they receive. For this reason we did not consider that aspect of police-public consultation in the current exercise. Therefore, when we talk about public consultation surveys we are not referring to quality of service surveys. Nor are we referring to the wider practice of community engagement, which involves greater participation and empowerment of the public in shaping services.
In carrying out this inspection we concentrated solely on the consultation processes of the forces themselves, rather than including the common agencies 3 under the Scottish Police Services Authority ( SPSA). This was in order to exclude organisations whose main role is not to provide services directly to the public but to support the forces. Nor does our remit extend to inspecting the SPSA as a single corporate body. We did, however, consider the Scottish Police College ( SPC) in its capacity of police training provider.
Finally, a word on the terminology used. The term 'community' pervades much of the literature and rhetoric in this area. And yet often its meaning can be ambiguous. For our purposes we have taken it to denote geographical proximity and have not assumed that it conveys any stronger sense of belonging. There is also commonly some confusion around the use of the term 'qualitative' when applied to performance measures. A qualitative measure is one that attempts to describe the properties or characteristics of something. Quantitative measures rely on numbers. Thus, while the finding that 'local and often minor criminal behaviour exerts a powerful influence on what the public think should be policing priorities ' is qualitative, the 'percentage of users who feel the police should concentrate on tackling low level criminality' is a quantitative measure.
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