Community work

It’s your community.  Unless you and others take the lead, it risks becoming a space that the odd violent thug and troublesome teenager will assume is theirs to do with and in as they wish.  And if that happens, it will only encourage opportunists to follow suit.  If as communities we set no boundaries, the young and the feckless won’t know when they’re close to crossing the line and then there’s not much for them to respect.  This in turn may be one reason so many of them demand respect from us.  Over the last couple of decades, the country has increased the numbers of police officers, created new laws and functionaries to address anti-social behaviour and it has set up community safety panels and local justice boards.  Yet the official figures show that last year, violent attacks by strangers rose by over 11%.

Even if people realistically thought the solution might be to flood the streets with more police and there was the money to do so, it wouldn’t make much difference.  The ability of the police to deter and tackle crime greatly depends on the information they get from the public and with so many people now walking-on-by, over 80% of the assailants are never even caught  – let alone prosecuted or punished.  In terms of catching criminals, CCTV has been a costly failure – an internal Met Police report shows that 1 crime is solved each year by every 1000 cameras. The fact is that things cannot get better without us and that means we need to start making a difference in the communities we live and work in.

Our starting point here at Witness Confident is that we still live in a free country and we don’t need to be given permission to be good citizens or to look after our own neighbourhoods.  While we will be trying to get the Government, the lawyers and the police to wise up to the vital role that witnesses can and should play and to engage with the public, real progress will only be made at the local level by us: engagement is a two-way process. 

By talking with and influencing the conduct and attitudes of individuals across our community - be they young or old, neighbours or policemen, politicians or journalists, school children or teachers – we can make a difference.  The system is not as bad as people have been led to believe and, given a dose of confidence, many more people will be as ready to engage as a witness when the see vilent street crime as they would wish if they were the victim of such an attack.