PUTTING COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT INTO COMMUNITY SAFETY

Seminar organised by Community Development Alliance Scotland, in association with Scottish Community Safety Network, 22 March 2010, at Renfield Centre, Glasgow

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Stewart Murdoch, Chair of CDAS, has identified the following Key Challenges raised by the day's discussions: 

  1. How do we protect/secure investment in diversionary activity for young people given the Minister's recognition of its importance, but the absence of any financial protection at local level?
  2. How do we liberate ourselves from bureaucratic and costly processes referred to by both the Minister and John Carnochan in order that we can focus our activity on delivery and outcomes?
  3. How do we respond to the public interest in engagement (with Community Safety issues) referred to by the Minister in a way which ensures that this engagement is positive, helpful and productive?  (Too often our experience of engagement is that we are engaging with people who are negative, obstructive and the cost of engagement is at the expense of delivery, ie it is not productive.)
  4. Are we moving fast enough to protect victims of domestic abuse?  Are those who brief Sheriffs and the legal system really understanding the needs of victims?
  5. How can we do more which is preventative without expanding or consuming more resources?  (Most accept that we have to reduce the demand for services and for interventions, but the only way to do this is to either spend more in the short term or to switch priorities, reducing investment in the investigation of crime or response to crime and pay more into diversion and prevention.)
  6. How do we promote a shift of expenditure from "reactive/retrospective/ compensatory" to "preventative/proactive/protective"?
  7. We heard keynote speakers question the effectiveness of some areas of public expenditure, but we can see no evidence of this impacting on policy at a community planning or local government level.  If some of the critical challenges, vis-à-vis expenditure on health and engagement of education, are not translated into policy guidance then nothing will change.
  8. A great deal of our discussion focused on "perception and reality" - even within an informed audience we were unable to agree whether current concern about increasing youth violence was justified or whether, in fact, the concern should be the continuing nature of youth violence, ie no real increase.

DOCUMENTS

These documents are made available with permission on a read-only basis and should not be altered or re-used by others

Speech delivered by Fergus Ewing MSP, Minister for Community Safety word

Presentation by Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, Violence Reduction Unit: Violence reduction – a public health issue ppt

Presentation by Jon Bannister, Senior Lecturer / Network Leader (Communities and Crime) the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, Glasgow University: Community development and best practice in community safety ppt