My experience
I retired from policing in 2021 having spent thirty years in a variety of roles and locations including front line response work, neighbourhood policing and intelligence work.
Woven into this were two periods of being an ASB Co-ordinator in Lincolnshire.
As with most practitioners with a fair amount of experience in this field I have worked in this role both before and after the implementation of the ASB, Crime and Policing Act, in 2014.
Find our more about Mark’s experience here.
The introduction of the ASB, Crime and Policing Act
It is true to say that, as with every fundamental change in practices and laws, the different ways we were to respond and deal with incidents of anti-social behaviour proved to be a little trickier than we had at first hoped.
Initially, there was optimism when realising the more obvious impact of having less options to choose from when considering our response.
Out went ASBO and CRASBO, in came civil injunctions and criminal behaviour orders, accompanied by various other alterations. There was a feeling that common sense was prevailing, allowing practitioners, and most of all, victims, to benefit from this streamlined approach.
However, this soon gave way to a protracted period of inevitable training, errors and rejected applications concerning every piece of new processes. It is thankfully true to say that after this period, processes, practices and protocols became less clunky as people became more familiar with them. I am very much an advocate of using the new legislation, which although not perfect, has nonetheless produced some excellent examples around the country. Practitioners have used the new tools and powers not only in the routine rudimentary way but also in imaginative innovative ways to act as an accomplice to existing tried and tested methods of community safety.
Here is a short snapshot of an experience I had with requesting and implementing a CBO and some of the methods used and types of issues it was used to try and resolve.
Case study: Major rise in shop theft incidents
In my first year of my second period as an ASB Officer, I noted a meteoric rise (63 %) in organised shop theft where stores were targeted by prolific thieves, often who had an entrenched drug/alcohol habit. What was also apparent, was these not only coincided with a similar rise in drug incident (using and dealing), firearms and knife incident reporting and intelligence, but the shop theft reports themselves reported a high use of violence/threats of violence towards staff and shoppers. I went to a Shop Watch meeting in the town and explained what I wanted to try and do to combat this three-pronged problem (volume crime, drugs, weapons/community harm problem).
I introduced everyone at the meeting to the concept of CBOs and explained how I was proposing to use them to tackle this problem. I had already begun to take statements from residents and shopkeepers who had direct experience of the offences but also of how much the incident really affected them. I explained I would like eight names of the most prolific perpetrators and those with the highest tendency to be violent. Within minutes I had a list of names. I explained that we needed highly focused attention on these people and that we all needed to use the Shop Watch radio channels whenever we had sightings and submit reports whenever we obtained information on them.
In the meantime, either I personally, or PCSOs from our beat teams would visit each victim/shop worker and take statements of loss of the property and a separate statement on just how this made them feel in a general sense. I had trained the police colleagues on the essential elements of loss but also to demonstrate the impact in terms of harassment, alarm and distress this had generated.
This yielded some powerful evidence. For example, some witnesses said they had been required to resign because the shop they were working at had been repeatedly targeted by thieves and the owners could no longer afford to keep them on. Some lost their Christmas bonus meaning they could not afford Christmas presents for their partners and children.
I had statements from tourists who had witnessed fights between drug addicts over stolen property and this had prompted them to not visit the town again.
I had a statement from the community beat manager and the beat Sergeant showing how this had impacted their policing plan and the general impact on residents and the community.
I had statements from shoppers threatened with knives (one had a pot of paint thrown at his young daughter and another was threatened to have his wife assaulted).
I now had a template of eight or nine statements of evidence as well as my own, demonstrating the link with the offences of shop theft and the causation of harassment, alarm and distress to individuals and the community as a whole.
I then added this to the bundle of evidence within the index offence and the application for a criminal behaviour order on conviction for that index offence.
This was used to accompany the same type of behaviour that the individual had exhibited in previous offending, showing a continued course of conduct. Additionally, we could go back to October 2013 on application, as when the act became law it was decided to be able to use anecdotal evidence from 12 months prior to the application for the CBO in question.
I first tried this at court in late 2016 but it was only after repeated failed attempts that in February the following year, we got our first shoplifting criminal behaviour order.
Positive requirements were essential within the order, since a landmark case involving a female urinating repeatedly in York Cathedral and subject to a CBO application where the application was refused on the grounds that there was no provision whatsoever for them to address their behaviour.
Another thing to be wary of is the similarity in wording of harassment, alarm and distress when considering the wording of public order legislation. However, in mind of the judgement of R V D. Bonner and others, where the Judge determined that whilst they are the same, it is not grounds for not implementing, granting or policing the CBO.
It was apparent with my applications that many of those involved had an entrenched drug habit and so on liaising with Public Health England, it was stipulated that each person would be banned from shop premises with the exception of one agreed premises (said business had to agree to this) and one premises to allow entry for collection of prescribed medication.
All communication was constant between partners (businesses, police, crime prevention and myself). Police systems were constantly monitored for those on a flagged watch list for CBO applications and for those that went on to breach them and I was alerted if there was any relevant incidents.
In the vast majority of cases CBOs stopped or altered the offending. Those that carried on offending but outside of the exclusion area were subject to addendum applications where the application saw a widened field of exclusion (in two instances, the area was extended to cover the entire East Midlands).
The results
This operation ran from 2017 until I retired in 2021 and resulted in the first 18 months of operation in a 68% reduction in shop theft (5% below norm).
24 successful CBO applications for shop theft.
Written trust and confidence back into local policing from shoppers, businesses and tourists.
Reduced drug use, working closely with rehabilitation, probation and the courts (where I regularly attended at least two times every week up until retiring). On occasion, I came across real success stories; one female won the right to have her children back to live with her after intensive work by community safety partners on their drug use which stopped altogether.
The evidence gleaned from this initial enquiry proved pivotal to demonstrate the link between ASB, volume crime and serious and organised crime when I was asked to show this through my application for CBOs against three separate gangs bringing drugs into our County. I produced a lengthy statement to explain my methodology to the Crown Court Judge in each of the 23 applications which were accepted and were successful in that they drastically reduced the ability of the gangs to reform, communicate and act in the way they had previously conducted their criminal business model.
This is exactly the kind of way innovation and thinking outside of the box can achieve results and supports the evidence-based policing mantra of ‘getting more bang for your buck’ in terms of partnership working and community support.
Conclusion
Having gained more confidence in this field I ran through some ideas I had in terms of dealing with prolific offenders with my council ASB Officer counterpart and our Police Force legal team.
I firmly believe that CBOs can and do work. Yes, it takes a lot of effort, but when you end up with these kinds of results, which mirror lots of other examples across the country and like me, you end up being telephoned by prosecutors suggesting that we go for a CBO, you realise that former opposition can be a thing of the past.
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