What happened during ASB Awareness Week?
By Nadine Gould, Housing Community Safety Team Leader
On Thursday afternoon I attended the Worlds Biggest Community Safety meeting as part of ASB Awareness week arranged by Resolve. We were lucky enough to have 3 people in attendance from the Home Office who are leading on ASB for the Neighbourhood Crime Team. Much of the conversation fed from other events that have taken place throughout the awareness week. On Monday, the new 5 ASB Principles were launched which are aimed at supporting the victim, looking at underlying factors, and best practise. On Wednesday, there was a brilliant day at a National Conference in London where there were some great speakers talking about a harm centred approached amongst many other things.
Recent stats have shown that 50% of people do not report ASB. This is for a number of reasons such as, they didn’t think it was serious enough or they didn’t think anything would be done. These comments are something that are very familiar to all of us. We know that less serious ASB cases have a way of escalating, if not dealt with properly or not reported at all. We debated how to get people to report it and the main themes were that there needs to be education about what ASB is and what is in our tool kit to resolve it. There needs to better communication around success stories and ‘you said, we did’ situations which will hopefully give victims the confidence to report.
We then spoke about the Community Trigger with the suggestion that it should be renamed the ASB Case Review. It seems that it is a tool not readily used as it appears to have a stigma that it is another way to complain. There should be a drive to see this as an opportunity to review that case and see what and if things could have been done differently, embracing it as a learning opportunity.
If you would like to learn more about anti-social behaviour and what it is, you can read our ASB Policy.