Inleiding en context

Goede morgen beste mensen, het is vandaag dinsdag 14 maart 2023. Zoals jullie zien heb ik deze ‘’kennisparel’’ al de avond voor 14 maart a.s. vanaf mijn ‘’thuiskantoor’’ verzonden. Ik stap namelijk morgenochtend om half zes op de trein richting Brussel om daar deel te nemen aan een adviesraad van het European Crime Prevention Network: https://eucpn.org/ Maar eerst nog een toepasselijk liedje bij het onderwerp van de bijgesloten ´kennisparel´: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqpQpt_cmhE

Bijgesloten ‘’kennisparel’’ gaat over messencriminaliteit, en in het bijzonder hoe hier vanuit praktijkmensen binnen de politie in het Verenigd Koninkrijk tegenaan wordt gekeken. Wat is de juiste aanpak? Hoe en met wie kun je samenwerken? Moet het probleem vanuit een volksgezondheidsprobleem worden benaderd? Wat is de rol van het zogenaamde probleemgeoriënteerde politieoptreden? Allemaal vragen die ook in Nederland relevant zijn vanwege het feit dat ook in Nederland geldt dat er sprake is van een ´messenprobleem´.

Bron

Bullock, Karen, Iain Agar, Matt Ashby, Iain Brennan, Gavin Hales, Aiden Sidebottom & Nick Tilley (February 2023). Police practitioner views on the challenges of analysing and responding to knife crime. Crime Science, vol. 12, 2 February, pp. 1-11. https://crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40163-022-00180-1

Summary

Knife crime remains a major concern in England and Wales. Problem-oriented and public health approaches to tackling knife crime have been widely advocated, but little is known about how these approaches are understood and implemented by police practitioners. To address this knowledge gap, this article draws on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 44 police personnel to consider the processes and challenges of applying problem-oriented and public health approaches to knife crime.

Findings show that knife crime was seen as a complex social problem which would not be solved by ‘silver bullets’; prevention was prioritised and the limitations of enforcement were widely acknowledged; there was an emphasis on understanding and responding to vulnerability and risk; discussion of ‘holistic’ and ‘whole systems’ approaches was evident (but these concepts were rarely defined); and the problem of serious violence was viewed as a shared, multi-agency issue that the police could not tackle alone.

Whilst the language of problem-oriented and public health approaches was evident among study participants in the context of knife crime prevention, the evidence presented here suggests that such approaches are currently being applied unevenly and imperfectly. Our findings indicate widespread agreement amongst informed police practitioners that knife crime is a complex social problem which would not be solved by a single agency, a single intervention or, arguably, a single approach. They suggest that there has been an emphasis on understanding patterns of knife crime and working in partnership to introduce responses that go beyond the enforcement of the criminal law.

The need to better understand what is effective in preventing knife crime was also widely recognised by stakeholders working in this field. These points chime with the conditions needed to facilitate the introduction of problem-oriented and public health approaches to crime prevention. Nonetheless, police practitioners were also clear that there are challenges in introducing these approaches—availability of data and analysts; partnership working; and nature of the evidence-base about the outcomes of interventions designed to address knife crime. To further embed problem-oriented and public health approaches, sustained attention will need to be paid to developing analytical capacity, facilitating the processes and structures of partnership working, and facilitating evaluation of knife crime prevention interventions. Without this investment and multi-agency system-wide changes in mind set and cooperation, knife crime prevention activity may well continue the contradiction of supporting proactive prevention but relying on reactive enforcement.

Various challenges were also evident, most notably around analysis of the drivers and patterns of knife crime and the evaluation of knife crime interventions. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for knife crime prevention and the implementation and advancement of problem-oriented and public health approaches to policing.

Afsluitend

Ook bij dit onderwerp is er sprake van een zogenaamde ´varkenscyclus´ in het beleid en praktijk. Ruim tien jaar geleden was er ook een ware golf van aandacht voor het fenomeen van messencriminaliteit, zowel in het VK als in Nederland. Vaak blijkt dan jaren later dat het collectieve geheugen binnen ons ministerie en daarbuiten bijna geheel is verdwenen. We gaan weer opnieuw fris en ´nieuw´ beleid maken. Soms is dat noodzakelijk wanneer de context waarbinnen dat geweld plaats vindt beduidend is veranderd. Maar meestal kan er geleerd worden van eerdere ervaringen met de aanpak van het fenomeen. Vanwege de aandacht voor het onderwerp van messencriminaliteit heb ik de afgelopen jaren deze ‘’kennisparels’’ over onderwerp verstuurd: 6;108;299;435; en 518. Ik zou zeggen maak er gebruik van.