Edinburgh Law School host an Executive Session to discuss local and community policing

Academics and the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR) came together on 21 October 2016

Edinburgh Law School and the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR) brought together a cohort of European stakeholders to discuss solutions and collaborations around local and community policing in Scotland.

Policing bodies in both Scotland and the Netherlands have undergone significant reform in recent years. Throughout such periods of change, it is vitally important to maintain locally responsive democratic policing. As a way of gaining insight from the comparative experiences of the two jurisdictions, Edinburgh Law School and SIPR hosted an Executive Session, which brought together senior officials from the Dutch police, the Ministry of Security and Justice of the Netherlands, Police Scotland, the Scottish Policy Authority, HMICS, Scottish Government and academics from the SIPR Network and the Netherlands to discuss the challenge of localism within national policing arrangements.

The event, held on 21 October 2016 at the University of Edinburgh, brought to the fore a range of issues for discussion, including questions around how to make partnership collaborations sustainable and more focused on collective delivery, as well as the importance of community representation and engagement within the processes of policing reform, in particular to ensure responsive and sensitive policing to increasingly diverse, and diversely located, communities. The participants also discussed the shift away from quantitative KPIs in both Scotland and the Netherlands, and the need to think creatively about new performance measures that better capture and incentivise the work of local and community policing. The Executive Session on Localism members plan to reconvene in the Netherlands in early 2017 to continue discussions about the challenge of providing local and accountable policing services through national police structures.

Based on a model developed by Harvard University, Executive Sessions seek to involve officials of relevant professions working with academics to explore solutions and potential collaborations around pressing societal issues. This Executive Session on localism in a comparative perspective sits within an ongoing series of Executive Sessions on Policing coordinated by SIPR and Edinburgh Law School. The event, organised by Dr Alistair Henry of Edinburgh Law School and Prof Nick Fyfe of the University of Dundee, built upon the Executive Session on Prevention convened in 2016, which brought together senior policy and government officials to learn about the ground-breaking work being developed by the police in New Zealand and the experimental work being undertaken in Scotland to implement such an approach here, all within the context of the Christie Commission's recommendations around the need for preventive and collaborative delivery of public services.

Edinburgh Law School and SIPR will host a third Executive Session in Spring 2017 around the issue of prevention, at which time a wider two-year programme of sessions, which seek to grapple with wider aspects of the Policing 2026 strategic vision of Policy Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority, will be announced.