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Helena Kennedy QC with Police Assistant Commissioner Rob Beckley explore our expectations of policing today and changing ideas of safety - in public, in private and online.

Can the police keep us safe? It’s argued policing has never been good at dealing with crime after the event and struggles now under the weight of increasing expectations. As Helena and Rob discover, definitions of harm have widened hugely in recent years and with this, more complicated ideas of what safety means to communities.

As harm is magnified by social media, mental health problems proliferate and cause harm in the community, drugs become mainstreamed, violence proliferates - the expectation is on the police to do something. Officers point out that policing can only deal with symptoms, and that social problems need solving rather than policing. This is coupled with an exponential increase in the complexity of what policing is asked to deal with, from expertise in mental health and social work to online safety and internet enabled harm.

With public trust in the police shaken by a series of high-profile scandals, the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer and forces such as the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police now in special measures, is the social contract between police and public corroding? Did it ever exist for some sections of the public? Robert Peel once wrote, ‘the police are the public, and the public are the police’– a formula at the heart of policing by consent. But the UK has different publics, multiple communities, which are policed differently. Certainly some communities feel safer around the police than others.

Talking to all ranks of the police across the UK, to criminologists and critics, Helena and Rob consider what we expect from the police now - is it too much, can they really deliver? - and what is the primary purpose of the police today? Over the course of the series they will ask if this is the moment for a new kind of social contract between public and police, where other institutions, both public and private - as well as citizens themselves, all of us – take more responsibility for safety and care in our communities, independent of policing.

Contributors this episode include: Director of the Police Foundation Rick Muir; founder of the Metropolitan Black Police Association and former Superintendent Paul Wilson; criminologist and author of The End of Policing Alex Vitale; former Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Zoe Billingham; Professor of Global City Policing at UCL Ben Bradford; PC Dunn and PC Howe; response officers from Avon Somerset Police and Kate West, dog handler for Kent Police; and Director of the Gypsy Roma Traveller Police Association.

Presented by Helena Kennedy QC with Police Assistant Commissioner Rob Beckley
Produced by Simon Hollis

A Brook Lapping production for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4

This series is dedicated to the late Roger Graef, criminologist and documentary maker.

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