In partnership with CGI, the Police Foundation established the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, which explores what type of police service is required to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.
This latest report from the review explores what it would take to shift the police’s approach to crime and wider harms through preventative measures. This also plays into how our police service can respond to modern day challenges, but also what role society as a whole (including non-policing public agencies, the private sector and local communities) should play in promoting public safety and security. The case for prevention makes intuitive sense. It is better to stop a bad thing happening in the first place than to deal with the effects afterwards. Preventative measures can reduce harm at the individual and population levels that are more beneficial than later interventions and helps to achieve wider economic and social benefits. However, there is little focus on prevention due to a number of interconnected reasons such as, political short termism, fragmented policymaking and possible lack of ‘cashable savings’, among many other reasons.
The report looks at the rationale behind shifting to prevention in relation to crime and other threats to public safety and applies a framework to some case studies to see what this approach might look like, and what this could mean for the role of policing.
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