So, what would we consider to be a living street? What gives it life and makes it a vibrant, safe, and sociable place which we all enjoy being about? In this community safety blog, I am going to highlight some of the key features and attributes which can contribute to making our streets alive and safe for everyone in the neighbourhood.

The Covid lockdown has offered us a glimpse into a more greener living environment, there were less motor vehicles and with their decrease in noise and exhaust fumes, we experienced an increase in people and families going out for walks and a similar increase in people travelling by wheels, including bikes, skateboards and scooters. The air was cleaner, the birds chirping much more noticeably, and the grass and undergrowth were left to grow, flourish and bloom without their regular cutting and maintenance.  The notion of prioritising pedestrians over cars is seldom a popular approach to designing our streets and shopping areas, people like the convenience of shopping by car and often travelling to shopping centres on the outside of their communities. This however has a negative impact upon the quality of our own streets and in the decrease of local shops catering for local needs and which are often owned and run by local people. The priority when planning and managing our streets always seems to be about how we move cars or motor vehicles about, and marginalised groups are often discriminated against and consequently are excluded from our streets and public places. This effects our older people , those with physical and unseen disabilities and other vulnerable groupings who are discouraged and alienated from walking their streets , going to local shops or hanging about socialising due to the intimidating designs of our streets and the dominance of the motor car. I recently was made aware of the Living Streets Scotland organisation and their Walking connects Project. I learned from them about how our public places often act as barriers to vulnerable groups like those with disabilities and how these so-called public spaces can make individuals and groups feel unsafe. I was made aware of how peoples human rights were being undermined and how they were being discriminated against and in fact how few people actually were aware of how their social spaces were being used to oppress and alienate them.

https://www.livingstreets.org.uk/about-us/scotland

Our communal spaces can be made safer and less intimidating if we include certain features, for example public seating. This provides a resting spot for those who might not be fully fit due to age or illness. Install benches with some plants and shrubs then we have created a comfortable social area, people will feel safer and they know they can rest and not be harassed and stressed as they go about their daily business. Clearly, we need to ensure that local people are involved with the design of their public spaces and this must be an inclusive process. Those whose needs are currently discriminated against need to be brought into this process as a priority and they will require support and positive encouragement to engage and participate effectively with that design process.

We often think back with nostalgia to when we could safely play football in the street, children were not at risk from motor cars and it was commonplace for people to gather and socialise at street corners. The motor car is here to stay so the main challenge now in making our streets alive and safe is how we manage the tension that exists between cars and people. How do we negotiate a positive outcome from this conflict which could convert our streets back to being the focus of our communities? A solution might be to agree days when cars are not allowed on certain streets and these spaces can then be converted into social and community spaces. This approach has been successfully developed and deployed by the Living Streets Organisation, with their pop up parks and Parklets. This can then be progressed through including mobile sports equipment and possibly a performance area and providing a temporary meeting construction with seats and cover from the weather.  

Beyond the pop-up parks and mobile social spaces, we can convert some of our litter and fly tipping hot spots into biodiverse planting areas or redevelop them into edible borders. This is an approach that I would like to develop as part of our Keep Camelon and Tamfourhill Tidy, Clean and Green campaign. This approach would take us beyond the litter picking and clearance of industrial refuse stage and onto making a positive contribution to addressing the climate emergency and provide a relaxed and enjoyable place to sit and socialise with your family and neighbours.

I believe that this approach and these examples are achievable locally, I would acknowledge that they are not a quick remedy to the issues, but they are a sustainable and viable approach. I would welcome your comments and thoughts on these ideas so please leave any opinions or thoughts in the boxes below, or contact myself directly at:

John R Hosie

Communitysafetyengager@tamfourhilltro.co.uk  

Repairing the Harm and rebuilding relationships in the community.

In this week’s Community Safety Blog I want to touch very briefly upon 2 interrelated methods or approaches which could be relevant to our own local community safety strategy. Firstly is Restorative Justice, this has many and varied definitions depending upon the context and the agency or service which is utilising the approach. The Scottish restorative justice consultancy process facilitated by the Scottish Government describes this model as:  “being a voluntary process that engages those responsible for and harmed by a criminal offence in constructive dialogue about the harm caused and what can be done to set things right.” This then is a model that can be deployed in a variety of contexts, including: Youth Justice, problematic environmental circumstances, within schools and other educational settings and in addressing anti-social behaviour. My attention was drawn to a recent act of local vandalism that involved some garden furniture being broken. After the culprits voluntarily owned up, they were given an opportunity to repair the damage and enter dialogue with the victims of the breakage. The young people responsible are now carrying out some voluntary work with the organisation who were affected by the initial vandalism. A positive outcome then for everyone involved, a common understanding reached, and a resolution was found that has avoided the involvement of the police and the criminal justice system and indeed any punitive measures and is a win, win for everyone. The key feature to this process has been empathy, all parties are able to consider how it might have felt for the others effected by their actions and also in this case the clients of the organisation where the vandalism happened. A better level of understanding has been facilitated and an appreciation for the value of others and sometimes the challenges they face has been reached. This is an approach which could be more widely deployed locally, we potentially could adapt and adopt a restorative method when agreeing our action plans to addressing the local community safety priorities. Clearly a working agreement would be required by all the agencies , stakeholders and the local community, before this approach could be viable. SACRO have described using Restorative Acceptable Behaviour Contracts in appropriate circumstances with the aim “to address offending behaviour in a way which empowers the people harmed, those responsible and wider community members to resolve the conflict in a meaningful way”   Another significant feature is that the person responsible is given an opportunity to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The person affected for example by the anti-social behaviour or Offence can also have some say as to how the case is resolved and where relevant and appropriate the wider community can be involved with the dialogue.

The essence therefore of Restorative Justice is to make a positive contribution to community safety through using constructive methods of addressing anti-social behaviour and Offending behaviour.  The underlying principles are that crime causes harm and that justice should focus on repairing that harm and the people most affected by the crime should be able to participate in its resolution. Restorative methods are imbedded to the notion that the community is responsible for the wellbeing of all its members both victim and offender.

And so to the second strand I want to highlight and which can be described as Environmental Restorative  Justice and this has been described as: “being a philosophy much more than a set of techniques for doing justice for the environment in a more relational, more emotionally intelligent fashion. It is about healing earth systems and healing the relationship of humans with nature and with each other.”(earthrestorativejustice.org) OK that sounds a bit like tree huggers jargon but in terms of our local community safety strategy it can be relevant to how we go about tackling our litter and fly-tipping problems. If we view the locations that are litter or messy hot spots as areas of environmental damage, then we can implement restorative projects like turning them into wildflower meadows or edible borders or convert them to community vegetable plots. The solution to clearing these locations can become more than a group litter pick or getting the council to remove industrial sized refuse that has been dumped in the community. Potentially it can develop into an environmental project, encouraging biodiversity, reclaiming lost land, and contributing to greater community cohesion and the sense of feeling safe. I have also been looking into Parklets and Pop up Parks which can be deployed to different locations throughout the community and provide a safe and enjoyable place for local people to meet and socialise.  Another pertinent example is from Keep Scotland Beautiful who run an annual competition called “it’s your neighbourhood” where groups develop a project which must address the three pillars of: Community Participation, Environmental responsibility  and gardening achievement, the winners get £13,000 for their project. Getting involved in Projects like these can be an empowering process and enables us as a community to contribute to the climate emergency and make our neighbourhoods a safer and better place to live and work. 

https://www.sustrans.org.uk/our-blog/projects/2019/scotland/pocket-places-scotland/

John R Hosie

Community Safety Engager

3^rd August 2020

A worrying trend highlighted in the survey results has been the level of concern raised about substance misuse and in particular drug dealing. 73% of respondents have indicated that they are either greatly or fairly concerned about drug dealers. This presents an enormous challenge for the local community safety strategy and requires the attention of our statutory services, voluntary & community organisations, and the problematic drug users themselves. The conundrum between supply and demand will continue at both a prevention and at an enforcement level whilst also acknowledging that the manifestations of the selling and purchasing of drugs are many and complex. Where a local community led safety strategy can play a significant role can be with the prevention of our young people getting drawn into problematic drug use in the first instance. This may be achieved through supporting and developing in partnership with them, appropriate educational resources and prevention activities through providing youth work approaches that  promote resilience, social skills and the confidence for our young people to make the right choices in often difficult and challenging circumstances. There can be a role for Falkirk Council and our local community hubs with delivering quality youth work provision and there can be direct workshop inputs and projects delivered by community volunteers and the community safety engager It would be naïve to expect the demand for dangerous drugs to reduce in the short term through a programme of education and preventative activities however this requires to be an important strand to any strategy that is developed with the local community.

Finding oneself in a situation where you have developed a problematic dependency upon drugs must be devastating for the user, their family, friends, neighbours and indeed the local community. The social costs of drug dependency are significant: through the legal and criminal costs and through the impact upon our health and care services. The emotional and mental health impacts will resonate beyond the user and will have negative effects upon others through the dealing of the drugs and the consumption of the drugs within the local community. Clearly a local strategy will need to take into consideration these associated factors. I will therefore endeavour to involve the specialist drugs agencies, Falkirk Council and also charities like the Cyrenians and SACRO who carry out invaluable work locally with people touched by the criminal justice system and through providing support to those with dependency and ongoing offending problems. I feel we need to be able to see beyond the labels and stigmatisation of being involved with problematic drug use and simultaneously living often challenging and chaotic lifestyles. We need to be able to actively involve everybody with the solutions to making our community a safer and better place to live and work.

Any local Community Safety Strategy addressing this concern will be reliant upon the enforcement of the law. This will represent a significant strand to reducing the negative impacts of local drug misuse and the problems arising directly from the selling of drugs. I have been in communication with the local community police officers and clearly, they will play a key role with developing and confirming our local strategy. I can see from the SIMD data for the local neighbourhoods where the problems are likely to be and I believe that there are specific locations that are of local concern. Off course the Police rely upon the reporting of crime and I understand that this is an extremely sensitive and complex issue. I fully appreciate why local people may be reluctant to report issues relating to drug misuse, especially if it involves your immediate neighbours and places you go and use yourself.  

The challenge ahead is significant and fraught with problems, however with the right partners involved and crucially the willingness of the local community to get  involved  then we can implement an  effective community safety strategy that will address some of the local concerns about substance misuse.   An important aspect of this will be to form and possibly constitute a local community safety forum which has local people , community groups and agencies all working together in order to develop programmes and activities which will go some way to addressing the local priorities for community safety. I will look at this notion of a local community safety forum in a future blog but again this approach will only be effective if it is driven forward by the local community for the local community.    

To conclude this week’s Blog I will highlight the work of an organisation called Fearless, I believe some of their approaches and  community based initiatives   can be replicated locally and can be adapted and adopted to our own  particular set of circumstances. What we often see as problems can become part of the solution and the resources and skills to deal with issues at a community level often lie within that community itself.

www.fearless.org/en/professionals/news/thank-you-scotland

Please could you complete a local survey, the responses are of great assistance in identifying and confirming the local community safety priorities and our future activity will be developed around these priorities. If you complete a survey by Friday 7^th August, then you can be entered into our prize draw and you can win yourself a brand-new Tablet.

https://tinyurl.com/ycbes5qw