Safer Communities in Scotland: Page 11

3.31 To be of any value, the audit needs to reflect local people's experiences and concerns about community safety problems. This complements the community planning approach adopted by councils in Scotland. Consulting the community is also one of the key principles of 'best value'.

3.32 There are three main reasons for consulting the community during preparation of the community safety audit:

3.33 Partnerships should make sure that the views are representative of the entire community. This includes adult residents and young people (young people are often excluded from consultation exercises but are particularly likely to experience crimes as victims or witnesses). Businesses often experience relatively high levels of crime and it is important to seek their views and experience.

3.34 It is also important to involve hard-to-reach groups, particularly those that are over-represented as either victims or offenders. These include disaffected young people, pupils excluded from school, 17-25 year olds, homeless people, ethnic minority groups, drug users, victims of domestic abuse and the gay community.

3.35 It can also be difficult to obtain the views of people who live in high crime neighbourhoods, where there is a fear of intimidation and fear of leaving home because of the perceived risk of becoming a victim of crime.

3.36 It is important that the audit captures the specific concerns and problems of rural communities. Although crime rates tend to be lower in rural areas than urban areas the level of fear of crime in rural communities can still be high. The lack of access to services, youth issues, lack of youth facilities, theft of agricultural equipment, theft from 'beauty spot'/tourist car parking areas, etc should be investigated.

3.37 It is unlikely that any one method of consultation will be adequate to sample the views of all elements of the local community and satisfy each of the needs for consulting with the community. Partnerships will need to use a variety of consultation methods, including

3.38 One of the first steps should be to look critically at existing consultation methods to see if they could be adapted to meet the needs of the audit process as part of an overall approach to community planning in the council area. In some cases, new methods for consulting the community will have to be developed.

3.39 Many local authorities will have established procedures for public consultation as part of community planning. Other agencies may also conduct their own consultation exercises. These may not be expressly designed to elicit information on community safety but information may arise as a by-product of discussing other topics. Such groups include tenants' and residents' associations, community councils, school parents' meetings, etc. Ways of obtaining this information and feeding it into the audit process and subsequent monitoring and evaluation regimes should be considered.

3.40 Public meetings are fairly simple to organise and offer a relatively low cost method of obtaining feedback on the results of the audit. Public meetings may highlight general concerns but there is the danger that these views may not be representative of the wider community, and they are not an effective means of obtaining information on levels of unreported crime, disorder, accidents, etc.

3.41 Partnerships should consider holding smaller more structured consultation events such as workshops or 'planning for real' events. This involves working in smaller groups to share views and experience, define priorities and explore a range of options. These events are more intensive and time consuming than public meetings and will need skilled facilitators to work with each of the small groups.

3.42 A number of key issues should be considered in conducting consultation meetings [see Box 3.10].

Box 3.10 Key consultation issues
What?	What are the aims of the consultation exercise? What resources will be needed (facilitators, flip charts, seats, etc)?
Who?	Who will organise/facilitate the event? Who will be invited? An open event? A special interest group (eg a youth forum)?
Where?	Where will the meeting be held? It should be easily accessible for all, including disabled people and people reliant on public transport, etc.
When?	When will the meeting be held? It should be at a time of day, day of the week that allows the greatest number of people to attend. Enough time should be allowed for the findings of the meetings to be incorporated into the audit report
How?	How will the meeting be advertised/people invited? Choices include adverts in the local paper, leaflets and posters in supermarkets. How will the meeting's findings be recorded and incorporated in the final audit?

3.43 Surveys of residents, young people and businesses (including the farming community in rural areas) can be a good way of measuring unreported levels of crime etc, fear of crime, people's concerns about wider community safety problems, and providing some information about priorities for preventive measures.

Surveys can be conducted by a variety of methods including postal questionnaires, telephone interviews and face-to-face interviews. Care should be taken to avoid bias through poor questionnaire design, unrepresentative sampling frames, interview bias, low response rates, etc. Experience shows that surveys are poor at measuring sensitive crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence.

Box 3.11 Hidden figures - 1997 Edinburgh Women's Safety Survey

Edinburgh Council's Promoting Women's Safety Working Group (a sub-group of the Community Safety Partnership) organised a survey of women in the city to make sure that any strategy prepared by the group reflected the every day experiences of women living and working in Edinburgh. Over 3,000 questionnaires were distributed via community groups, through the workplace and, to a lesser extent, at train and bus stations and outside supermarkets. The questionnaire was available on request in translation, in Braille and in large print format: 1,110 questionnaires were returned.

The survey was designed to answer such questions as:

How safe do women feel?
Do women feel differently at night?
Do they feel safe on public transport?
How prevalent are incidents of crime, harassment and intimidation?
Are women more frightened of strangers or people they know?
What agencies do women contact?

The survey was advertised in Scotland on Sunday, Edinburgh Herald and Post and Noticeboard, the newsletter of Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council. This generated several requests for questionnaires, further information, expressions of interest and offers of help.

The survey produced useful information, some of the key findings included:

Over half of the respondents had been physically assaulted or had been subjected to unwanted sexual activity at some time in their lives. One in five women had been physically assaulted by their partner
Only one in five women who had been physically assaulted or had been made to take part in unwanted sexual activity contacted statutory or voluntary services for help
Women feel less safe at night. However, women feel unsafe in public car parks even during the day
Having to wait for public transport appears to reduce women's likelihood of using it: poor lighting, isolation and obvious exposure all contribute to feelings of vulnerability

Box 3.12 Investigating residents' priorities

A number of partnerships have used Priority Search to investigate the community safety priorities of the local community. Priority Search combines aspects of qualitative and quantitative methods. Focus groups are organised with representatives from the target population (eg young people, residents of the area, etc) to define issues which are then used to construct a questionnaire for use in the main survey. This questionnaire is distributed widely and the results analysed to identify the priorities of the target population.

The technique has been used by the former Lothian Regional Council to assess the needs of young people in the Craigmillar area. Midlothian Community Safety Partnership used a similar approach to assist in developing youth projects in their area.

3.44 National surveys can be used as a basis of developing questions for inclusion in local questionnaires. Results of local surveys can then be compared with national findings. Relevant national surveys include the Scottish Crime Survey and the Scottish Business Crime Survey (both available through The Scottish Office).

3.45 Focus groups can be used to obtain the views of hard-to-reach groups. They are also a way of obtaining qualitative information and can be used as a way of providing more in-depth information about issues raised in a community survey. Focus groups generally bring together small groups of people (usually 6 to 10) to discuss specific issues under the guidance of a facilitator.

It is important that the facilitator is skilled in conducting focus groups, has effective communication skills and knowledge of community safety issues. Focus groups have the disadvantage of only reaching a small percentage of the community and may not be representative of the community or target group. They are not an effective means of obtaining information on levels of unreported crime, disorder, accidents etc.

3.46 Citizens' panels are used in the same way as focus groups but their views are sought on more than one occasion. Some councils may be using citizens' panels as part of community planning or work on best value.

Panels may consist of tens or hundreds of people. Panel members can be contacted by telephone or invited to attend meetings. They should be representative of the community and can also be weighted to include groups not usually consulted by other means. Their views can be tracked over time to monitor changes in attitudes and experience. Panels can prove an effective way of gauging public concerns and opinions but they are not an effective means of obtaining information on levels of unreported crime etc.

3.47 Partnership members will have many other opportunities to obtain the views of their community. This will include police officers meeting members of the public in the street and attending Neighbourhood Watch and tenants' association meetings, or youth workers carrying out detached work with young people.

This may help the partnership to get a good 'feel' for local concerns and problems, and such information could be fed into the audit process. The information can be used to support other sources of information but there is a danger that the views obtained may reflect the prejudices of individuals and may not represent the views of the community at large. Such information must be used with caution.

3.48 Partnerships need to examine past and present policies and initiatives that impact on community safety. This is best achieved by a combination of interviews with key staff from relevant agencies and reviews of policy documents, evaluation reports, etc.

3.50 It may be possible to map the availability of services and compare the distribution to that of crimes etc, revealed by the community safety profile.

3.51 Some people interviewed, or asked to provide reports, may be uncertain about what community safety is and how their role impacts on community safety. It may be useful to brief senior officers to be able to answer these key questions (this may be by formal seminars, informal meetings or written documents).

3.52 The audit requires various agencies to provide information that needs to be analysed and presented in report format. Information on individuals is not needed for the audit. Provided information is exchanged between agencies in aggregated format, and identities cannot be worked out, data protection principles will not be breached.

3.54 Partnerships should consider developing multi-agency information sharing protocols as part of their on-going work.

3.55 The audit process may produce several different documents (such as a community safety profile, survey reports and the findings of the policy and practice review). Alternatively, partnerships may produce a comprehensive audit report that summarises the findings. Once the partnership has considered the key findings of the full report, they will be able to decide the priority objectives (Chapter 4).