Taking back our streets – a mission bigger than the criminal justice system?

“Make no mistake, whether in Southport, London or Hartlepool these people are showing our country exactly who they are….” said Prime Minister Starmer in response to this summer’s violent, racist riots.

Following hundreds of arrests in English towns and cities, the Prime Minister said that this was “not protest, it’s not legitimate, it’s crime”. 

I agree with the Prime Minister that the criminal justice system is the right route for those that would chuck bricks at the same officers who attended the Southport tragedy, or who would burn down a library that doubled up as a community hub.  

But the larger job of bringing together communities put under strain by recent violent disorder isn’t a job for the police and the courts alone. And unfortunately, community cohesion or social wellbeing was in a poor condition well ahead of the disturbing events of the last few weeks. 

Our Life in the UK survey work from last year showed that more than a quarter of people feel unsafe or very unsafe walking alone in their neighbourhood after dark while two in five people said they had experienced discrimination over the past year.

And a recent update to the UK Measures of National Well-being Dashboard showed that one in seven adults feel unfairly treated by society while only about half of adults in Great Britain agree or strongly agree that people from different backgrounds get on well together in their local area.

Where could you start when trying to address these problems? Two innovative approaches come to mind as local leaders look to rebuild.

The first is the approach taken by Scotland’s violence reduction unit which treated knife crime as a public health problem and developed long-term solutions to prevent the violence rather than just lock up perpetrators.

In recent public debate it has been pointed out that improving public health is a job bigger than the NHS. Could a parallel argument be constructed that if Labour are going to successfully deliver on their mission to “take back our streets” then that will be a larger job than one that can be delivered by the police and the courts? 

The second area to look is the partnership we’ve struck with the Poverty Truth Network whose work pivots on the answer to the question: “What if people who struggled against poverty were involved in making decisions about tackling poverty?”

Put simply, policy proposals to restore community cohesion are unlikely to have success if they’re exclusively developed on computers in Whitehall.

As the new UK Government looks to assert itself following the violence, it would be easy to characterise this as a problem for the police and emergency services exclusively. However, the wider response to this summer’s incidents will require more than one layer of government and, to be given the best chance of success, should be developed in partnership with local communities.