Jon Garland and Karen Bullock
Jon Garland and Karen Bullock collaborated with David Huse (a former Chair of Neighbourhood Watch who sponsored the research) and Surrey Police to develop, implement and investigate ways of motivating and empowering children and young people to engage with the police to devise initiatives aimed at reducing crime. Whilst the police commonly engage with communities – via meetings, focus groups, surveys, community events and so on – these initiatives tend to be focused on adults or otherwise adults are attracted to them when young people are not. ‘Positive Futures’ was designed to start to reverse this trend.
The plan behind ‘Positive Futures’ was to encourage young people to think about the local community problems that concern them and then to work with teachers, youth workers, the police and council workers to devise solutions to them. The project employed a structured process in three pilot areas in Surrey whereby children and young people used police data and other resources to help them identify the problems they felt were the most significant in their communities and how they affected their lives, and then to work with professionals to think though sustainable solutions to them. At the end a formal presentation was held where children and young people presented their findings to an audience of community leaders to hear about their work, applaud their achievements, and start to make arrangements for resolving the issues they identified.
Our role was to evaluate these three pilot projects, which we did via interviews with key stakeholders and young people in each area. We found a number of positive aspects to ‘Positive Futures’: that children and young people valued the idea that they were making a difference and that their voices were being heard; that some of the issues they identified had begun to be tackled; that they had developed a better understanding of the local community; that they had improved their own feelings of safety; had developed better relations with their local police officers and also grown in self-confidence. One young person told us:
‘It was all quite fun. I think there is a self-satisfaction you get from helping out the community really, and if you want to live here for the rest of your life and you want your kids to grow up here, then you can always look back and reflect on all the impacts you’ve done on the community’.
Ultimately, ‘Positive Futures’ was well received both by the young people who participated and the stakeholders who were involved in its development and delivery. There were some issues identified, not least with the time, resources (financial and otherwise) and commitment needed to carry out the pilot projects, as well as problems with red tape, bureaucracy and delay. Ultimately, though, the ‘Positive Futures’ initiative is important because it tells us that children and young people will engage with the police to work towards solving community problems that concern them, something which is often hard to achieve.
Read the evaluation report here
