What
Witness Confident is the independent charity that is taking a stand against the walk-on-by culture that fuels street violence, feeds fear and fractures communities. We launched on 9 September 2009 (9/9/9) and our plan is to have secured the cultural, legal and practical changes that are needed within the decade to reduce the level of street violence by 20%.
Our charitable objects are "to promote for the public benefit greater public participation in the prevention and solution of crime and to promote good citizenship and civic responsibility in England and Wales by:
- working with communities to engage with and support individuals who witness violent or serious crime;
- providing advice, guidance and assistance for individuals who witness violent or serious crime;
- advancing ways that new technology can enable such greater public participation; and
- undertaking research, influencing practice and policy and informing public perceptions".
Witness Confident is a registered charity (no 1131106) and a limited company (no 6917476) in England & Wales. We have also been designated a legal advice centre by the Bar Standards Board.
Who
Our chair is Neil Svensen (design & communications), his deputy is Shonali Routray (law & whistleblowing) and our other trustees are Richard Barron (sociology & community engagement), Ian Harley (policing & business) and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong (barrister & author on witness evidence). George Gross (a defence solicitor) acts as our adviser.
The work is led by our director, Guy Dehn (barrister & policy practitioner). Our communications officer is Adam Evans (who also designed this site), our development officer is Dominic Wiltshire and our adviser is Andrea Parry. Martin Kolar is the programmer helping with the street violence site. Winnie Gardiner and Gill Helweg Larsen help with our schools and IT initiatives. Rufus Leonard continue to advise on and assist with our design, brand and IT work.
In this our third year we have had welcome help from a number of volunteers: Rik Ganly, James Ross, Nicolo De Bertolis and Esther Jones Russell. We also thank Anna Myers who assisted with our schools work and legal issues and James Bryant of Epiphanies who reviewed our street violence site We have also benefited from the support of Kyrylo Alenchy (a Young Upriser), Gemma Amran (a bar student), June Isherwood (an HR consultant), Sara Jones (media consultant), Ally Spicer (market research) and Andrea Stancakova (community relations).
Our advisers are Peter Dale (documentary maker), Adam Raphael (writer) and Sarah Spencer (equality & diversity expert).
Why
Guy Dehn had the first inkling for a project like Witness Confident in the summer of 2008 shortly after he left Public Concern at Work, the whistleblowing charity, that he had founded and ran since 1993. In one significant way, Witness Confident is addressing the same dilemma that Public Concern at Work had - how to get people to speak up when the interests of others (rather than their own) are at stake. The important difference being that Witness Confident is addressing this issue in the wider community and in the contexts of violent crime and the walk-on-by society, while Public Concern at Work focuses on wrongdoing in the workplace.
Initial consultations with people familiar with the criminal justice system indicated that the witness issue was an elephant in the room – something that had become so big that people had lost sight of it. At the same time the Tory thinktank Reform warned that Britain was becoming a nation of passive bystanders “where people feel increasingly incapable and unconfident to maintain the rule of law themselves, instead abdicating responsibility to a remote and technocratic criminal justice system” and a report by Louise Casey for the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, began “Crime is tackled most effectively when the law-abiding majority stand together against the minority who commit it”.
The senseless murders that summer of Frank McGarahan in Norwich, Ben Kinsella in Islington and of Shaquille Smith in Hackney brought home the tragic and too real consequences of a culture where good citizens are discouraged by the system. While those responsible for these murders have been convicted, the cases demonstrate the pressing need for ordinary decent people to be given the confidence to stand up to violent crime. The first outline proposal for a charity to address this issue was drafted on 7th September 2008 and, a year later, on 9/9/9, we launched.
