Community justice: our work in the field

Examples:

Home Office: citizen-focused policing pilot facilitation and evaluation (2004/5). We worked with the Home Office to support the Government’s policy on involving communities in local policing, including support to three community engagement pilot sites in authorities and central support to the Home Office team. The resulting guide to community engagement in policing can be found on the Home Office site.
Coaching officers in the police service. Download a short paper.
Tackling discrimination and developing diversity We were the first organisation of our kind to run women-only and black & minority ethnic-only management development programmes for the police services. More recently we have helped a large urban police force to carry out a review of its own gender-based diversity development programme.

Resources and external links

We work with all the different agencies and partnerships involved in securing balanced criminal justice and community safety. For example:

Local crime and disorder partnerships

We help local crime and disorder partnerships (CDRPs) to handle a variety of challenges, through:

Making leadership work, so that different agencies inspire and support each other through new and better ways to prevent crime
Conducting audits of local needs, to ensure that local crime and disorder reduction strategies are responsive and tackle local priorities
Evaluating practice and projects, so that there is an increasing focus on changes that work and make a sustainable difference to crime and antisocial behaviour.
Identifying and overcoming barriers created by different financial, human resource and information technology systems, to make them work together more effectively.

Police and police authorities

We help the police and police authorities address a number of significant challenges, including how to:

create innovative structures (consortia, collaborations and mergers) that work across and within police service boundaries to protect the public and tackle ‘Level 2’ criminality
recruit and retain people with the right range of skills, wisdom, professionalism and community knowledge
develop an approach that takes the right course through a diverse ethical and political landscape
make best use of all resources available – through innovative approaches to resource gathering and changing practice to achieve gains in efficiency and effectiveness
Help build a joined-up criminal justice system that balances rather than exacerbates social inequalities and incorporates the interests of all those involved, especially the public.

Agencies and voluntary organisations

At OPM we work with a wide range of organisations who are taking action to achieve safer and more secure communities. For example:

we reviewed the function and governance of a voluntary organisation whose role is to observe the handling of suspects and offenders within the criminal justice system.
we have supported the use of restorative justice (RJ) for both young and adult offenders, through our work with youth offending teams (YOTs), national RJ networks and voluntary organisations.
we helped a government agency which sets standards and investigates complaints to create a performance framework for tracking progress and improvement in its work.
we've worked with the Commission on Young Adults in the Criminal Justice System, helping them develop programmes and services aimed specifically at offenders over the age of 18.

Courts and the Crown Prosecution Service

Read our report, Community Justice – a US-UK exchange: see our CJ resources page

The courts and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are at the frontline of the criminal justice system (CJS). The public often have their views of the whole CJS informed by the actions (and reported actions) of these two agencies. To date our work with courts services and CPS have focused on how effectively they communicate internally and externally, and take account of what the public thinks about the CJS. We have worked with agencies to help them focus their efforts to engage the public as court users and as citizens.

The Home Office and regional offices

Our work with the Home Office and their colleagues in the regional offices has involved us in a variety of special, national and international strategies designed to tackle crime and the fear of crime. Our role is to assist them to:

develop their leadership capacity and capability to make substantive inroads into crime and the fear of crime
find new ways to connect with the public so that policy and practice at the highest level of government is informed by the needs and wishes of local communities
enhance how the government influences practice at the front line of service delivery and continue to generate substantial improvements in community safety.

Offender management, prisons and probation services

We are guided by the following principles and ideas:

Offenders come from the extremes of society and therefore represent the most challenging of people and communities with whom to work
It makes sense for all involved (offenders, wider society and government) to find ways of reducing re-offending rather than allow prisons and probation services to become ‘revolving doors’.
The best form of justice is one which aims to restore the victim, the community and the offender to a state of well-being where the offending will not continue and the damage is repaired.
Sentences, attached conditions and the treatment and support given to offenders, in prison or in the community, must be shown to work and must achieve their purposes
Agencies involved in offender management need strong leadership, well developed organisations and the best of governance if they are going to be able to reduce re-offending.

Projects we have worked on to support these principles include our study into prison dental health services, coaching sessions with senior managers and chief officers, and reviews of communication practices with local probation boards and the prison service.

If you think we can be of help, please email: Munira Thobani or Paul Lloyd or phone us on 0845 055 3900.