Delivering Safer Communities – A Path Strewn with Unnecessary Hurdles

Community safety is an outcome, and all of us aspire to live, work, and play, in safer communities. They are a fundamental part in a higher quality of life. There are substantial obstacles that stand in the way of that outcome; and these include some political, some economical, some social, some historical, role protective behaviour, inter-agency failure to share actionable information, misplaced performance measurement, and agency agenda variations, among a raft of other blockers.

The Lions Gate Community Assessment Program is designed to remove those obstacles that stand in the way of sustainably safer communities.

We bring our highly qualified team to bear and assist on issues and have an exceptionally broad foundation based on experience, exposure, academic and research pedigree, public sector operations, and law enforcement specialisms. We bring: Public sector municipality and policing law enforcement experience – Offender management experience – High competence in analysis to convert information into actionable intelligence – A strong established contextual research pedigree – Critical thinkers and problem solvers – Behavioural assessment specialists – Community safety and designing out crime specialists – Skilled community engagement practitioners – Highly competent environmental visual auditors – Multi-agency community safety partnership working experience – Understanding of crime science and criminological theory – Understanding of community crime dynamics – Insight into crime control and the politics of public safety.

Our process includes –

Baseline Mapping (Program Management Plan, Hard Crime Statistics and GIS Mapping, Environmental Visual Audits, Live, Work, Play Interviews / Surveys)–
Partner Consultation (Law Enforcement Interviews and Offender Profiling, Fire, EMT Interviews Arson and Injury Data Download) Health Interviews, Programs, Community Interventions, Municipality Interviews, Programs, Pledges, Strategies, Community Groups, BIA’s Interviews, Voluntary Sector Interviews, Focus Groups, Hard to Reach Groups, On Street Community Interviews–
Contextual Research (Security Professional Network Surveys, Legislative Context, Evidential Context, Experiential Context, Case Study Research, Crime Reduction Theoretical Frameworks –
Response Development – A Safer Community Outcome is achieved by combing crime prevention measures (Enforcement Strategy, Situational Interventions Strategy), with criminality prevention measures (Social, Developmental, and Community Programs Strategy, Rehabilitation Programs Strategy).
Report – We provide rationale, justification, and prioritization behind each measure. Measures are carefully balanced for optimal impact and are complementary. We identify who we feel should be the owner of each piece of work and appropriately redistribute the responsibility of a project.
Report Presentation – Client Audience and Q & A.
Execution and Assessment – are the responsibility of the client.

Our current system is not geared up to deliver sustainably safer communities, and despite zero intent to fail, most operating in the public sector, are acutely aware of the systemic shortcomings and failures and allow continual reinflation or reinvention of the flat tire. The situation is most often pigeonholed under, either, too difficult to change, or too risky personally and professionally to address or enhance. Employees, particularly those in criminal justice, will not be motivated to see the budget and pendulum swing towards criminality prevention or crime prevention outside enforcement. Tackling root causation rather than simply applying symptomatic responses will be perceived as self-defeating because these employees rely upon a system that is post-victimization focused, to keep their jobs.

It would be possible to write a tome unpacking the issues and while I have partially opened pandora’s box, I do not intend to pull the lid off further by expanding on the myriad issues, except to signpost in support of a route forward and offer a unique reflection.

Public service is stretched and demands upon public service are increasing, particularly for law enforcement agencies. More is being demanded with reducing capability. It has become a custom and practice for citizens to believe that increasing police service establishments, is the solution to safer communities. Indeed, law enforcers are often partially responsible for massaging this belief by stepping up to fill a void left by others who are better placed to contribute to a safer community delivery outcome. I applaud their ambition but the mission creep beyond enforcement that results, diminishes their potency in that crime prevention area. The proper redistribution of responsibility for community safety has never really been resolved and requires urgent attention if the offending agenda is to be properly analysed and the consequent mending agenda is to be coherent and effective.

The delivery of safer communities should be led by governments, Municipal, Provincial and Federal. The municipality as the recipient of taxpayer dollars through property taxes, has lead responsibility for delivering best value for citizens. They must also be held accountable for expenditure with outcome evaluation undertaken. Did it work or not? This requires multi agency data driven business cases for resource allocations, despite privacy, need to know needs to be redefined. Hanging wallpaper with one arm tied behind your back is unnecessarily difficult, so free that arm and share. Historically, data collection and performance measurement has invariably been lacking or misdirected. By definition, a clear understanding of the issues and solutions that are proven to work is a fundamental requirement as is the professional community safety competency of those engaged in driving this work. It is my experience having worked in this area in public service, that the required competency is not at once present in most employees, certainly during early tenure. That lack of competency can be sustained and to the detriment of outcomes without informed leadership and where the individual is averse to learning the right stuff and continually developing professionally in the right way. How else can poignant questions be asked as to why we do or implement things a certain way, particularly when it appears ineffectual? Informed and questioning leadership is critical for subordinate continual professional development to flourish and grow in the right direction.

So, where does Lions Gate Risk Management Group sit on moving this agenda forward?

Substantial Obstacles – The myriad obstacles will often seem insurmountable and no stakeholder working in the public sector can take issue with those I have listed. At Lions Gate with our third-party standing, and environment exposure, we can provide, objective, informed, hidden agenda breaking, guidance and direction, supported by rationale and justification and a cost effectiveness business case. It will require an efficacious response for parties competent to act, and a shift in thinking and approach, particularly around pertinent information sharing. The pieces of the puzzle are out there but right now they do not fit together, and some may just be cherry-picked from another puzzle box and conflicting or different to the ideal finished picture. Interlocking and complementary must be the goal.
Reinflation or Reinvention of the Flat Tire – Our Lions Gate Research Core includes a specialist and experienced team of researchers and analysts. They bring extensive former public sector experience and ability with added academic capability in combination. We are highly familiar with working in the public sector research domain. We ask the right questions and go down the right rabbit holes. If what we find is broken, we supply guidance to fix it. If a new hole is needed, we supply an instruction manual to dig it. In combination our team has over a century of public sector experience. We know what works.
Criminality Prevention Tackling Root Causation – For decades, the public sector spending pendulum and investment has swung in the direction of enforcement to address public safety issues, crime, and nuisance. Law enforcement is excellent when it focuses on investigation, detection, arrest, and file preparation for the wider criminal justice system leading to sanction including incarceration. This is their traditional role before mission creep. On its own it does not reduce the offender traffic that is the revolving door of criminality. It is a post victimization strategy feeding the criminal justice system and self-defeating in consequence. Effective criminality prevention is not within the control of law enforcement or the criminal justice system. It is the most complex and the most lacking area under crime reduction. Missing at its core is the introduction of protective factors for all individuals from early childhood and throughout their lives. Those factors are in the hands of families, schools, communities, health care, peers, support groups and many others. You become part of the revolving door of crime and nuisance when risk rather than protective factors predominate in your life. Just one break in that protective chain can lead to offending behaviour.
Public Service is Stretched – Reducing budgets and increased service demand conspire to limit the attention given community safety by public sector organizations. The posture is reactive, and measured proactivity or preventive strategies are casualties, often diluted and even tokenistic, just to try and keep up. Trying to drink water from a fire hose is an analogy I have heard in law enforcement circles. What is needed is effective public private partnership. Private partners with competency, dedicating the time and effort needed to design proactive initiatives and preventive strategies which will certainly pinpoint where investment needs to be placed for greatest impact.
Redistribution of Responsibility – The spend in public service agencies is disjointed and can often be conflicting or counterproductive. Silo operations best describes the status quo where the direction taken by one agency can have an immediate negative impact on another. This is not cost-effective spending of tax paying dollars. As an example, I think it unarguable that the health sector must play a lead role in child development, fostering mental health wellness, and intervening where right to protect young people who are exposed to risk. Health needs to take a proactive preventive approach to tackling those conditions that foster addiction, to drugs, alcohol, prescription medications. Health must also thoroughly evaluate the impacts of harm reduction initiatives and their potential for causing added harm in communities. Municipality planning departments must and do factor in how the built environment either fosters crime or community safety and permit accordingly. It is poorly designed and ill thought developments historically that place a larger response burden on law enforcement and other response agencies. The work of family support networks needs to be integrated into the wider plan, case management and diversionary approaches must be coherent, driven by the sharing of relevant pertinent data, between partners. Lions Gate could help design this integrated and coherent network and redistribute responsibility appropriately, supported by rationale and justification.
Criminality Prevention – Is massively under-resourced and misunderstood. Funding and resources most often arrive too late in the day and could only be described as late intervention. Case management teams often intervene when a behaviour is deeply entrenched and recidivist, and that is too late. Until criminality prevention is adopted by all, and protective factors are the focus for all ages, right from early childhood, the revolving door will continue to spin.
The offending agenda – Lions Gate has a team with decades of exposure to and experience of offender behaviours and motivators. We know what makes them tick. The threats and adversaries and their associates in communities will be known to law enforcement, and it would be fair to state that the knowledge is guarded and protected. Prolific offenders, and recorded crime data ‘cards,’ are kept close to their chests, and that information drives the enforcement agenda. While leading community safety initiatives for Northamptonshire Police in the United Kingdom, Mike Franklin had access to a dedicated crime pattern analyst. He also had access to a dedicated community safety research unit called ‘Compass.’ Called Compass first because it would show you the right direction; second because it would also redistribute responsibility. Using these resources, law enforcement data, and underpinned by theoretical understanding, Mike drove a change in mindset from problem profiling to solution profiling, with the weight shifted to proven works solutions, and other partner engagement. Data driven business cases driving the solution agenda are vital and this is a major part of the answer.
The mending agenda – Currently lacks the detail-oriented research necessary to find coherent and complementary approaches which are effective and sustainable. Lions Gate can guide this. The mending agenda needs to understand the limitations for enforcement, situational interventions, developmental, social and community programs and interventions and then rehabilitation: Enforcement – Incarceration is a good short term crime prevention measure but only for the duration of the sentence. It gives the beleaguered community some breathing space and recovery time. If this action is to have a long term and sustainable impact though, then other actions need to happen in tandem. Situational Interventions – The location that fostered the offending behaviour needs to change; the conditions that enabled the offending need to change; commission of an offence needs to require more effort; the offender needs to be exposed to greater risk of being caught and that includes meeting a more confident community committed to reporting suspicious behaviour and criminal activity. A community where risk to the offender is increased and opportunity to offend is reduced. Developmental, social and community programs or interventions – Most offenders find themselves where they are because throughout their lives, they have been exposed to risk factors. All individuals need a healthy dose of protective factors as a foundation for legitimate self-sufficiency. For those at risk of offending protective factors may divert. For current offenders, these interventions have either not been reinforced or delivered or they have made poor choices. Rehabilitation – You cannot return an offender to the environment and conditions they left without new tools to help them succeed. There are foundations that must be in place. A roof over the head, the skills to secure an income from legitimate employment, treatment for mental health or addiction issues, continuing support for the family to ensure the protective factors the children need to become productive members of their communities are being delivered. If you do not, then the individuals cycle of crime is not broken, and another generation is fed, and engages in, offending behaviour.
Governments must Lead – Public safety and community safety should be led by governments, Federal, Provincial, and Municipal. Their span of control does not automatically cascade in a coherent way and fractured approaches, often conflicting approaches, result. At the core of the fracturing is a lack of depth and breadth of community safety knowledge. We must remember that governments are politicians, driven by information provided by civil servants, and accept that they often lack the hands-on skills, knowledge and abilities needed to steer the community safety agenda. They are reliant upon their civil service teams to analyse data and information and even where this is done transparently and honestly, negative messaging is often avoided because of the political fallout. Speaking to what is happening is often a casualty of positive slant. If layers of government are not driving in the right direction, then other road users will often be negatively infected.
Professional Community Safety Competency. – Well-trained, normally highly competent, qualified law enforcement individuals lead the charge when it comes to detection, investigation, arrest, and then onward processing through the criminal justice system. Less attention to detail follows the crime prevention end of the game, and where, basic security advice, leaflets, crime stoppers, and volunteer organizations like block watch are holding the baby all in the name of delivering safer communities. A crime prevented does not make for great television, and the public appetite is for crime solved, not blank spaces on screen where the crime has been prevented. I started policing as a crime prevention officer; I learned my craft beginning in 1991 under the tutelage of two police constables. Both fine individuals but by their own admission ‘put out to pasture,’ after long policing careers. Crime prevention was dining on the crumbs left at the budget table, and never really taken seriously. Now 32 years later, I know much and have never allowed my inauspicious beginnings to stop me learning and growing every day. Had I not driven myself and pursued my agenda, I would have stagnated. Worse, the organization would not have blinked an eye. Push on and do your best, I have some proper policing to do! Crime prevention needs to be elevated at the budget table and given credence. My UK experience is replicated here in Canada where I found lovely people but well out of their depth tackling crime prevention. Not their fault, because they can only use the tools they are equipped with or provided, and follow the direction given by their masters. The pendulum in criminal justice swings the same way in all western democracies.

For more information or training programs tailored to your business, please contact michaelfranklin@lgrmg.ca . For any support and assistance call 1.604.383.0020 or toll-free at 1.800.212.2026 or visit www.lgrmg.ca at any time. Our expertise is your peace of mind.

Delivering Safer Communities – A Path Strewn with Unnecessary Hurdles

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