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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. Definitions of harm have widened hugely in recent years and with this, more complicated ideas of what safety means to communities.

In this episode, Helena and Rob turn to the question of safety and harms in the domestic sphere, especially violence against women and girls – a situation heightened during the pandemic. And will the publication of the Police’s new Race Action Plan help secure consent and trust in the UK’s Black communities, where distrust, historically, runs deep?

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: Founder of the Metropolitan Black Police Association and former Superintendent Paul Wilson, author and advisor to government on crime prevention Tom Gash, former Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Zoe Billingham, poet, musician and author Benjamin Zephaniah, Chief Executive of the College of Policing and Chief Constable Andy Marsh, criminologist Patrick Williams, independent chair of the oversight board for the 2022 Police Race Action Plan Abimbola Johnson, PC Dunn and PC Howe, response officers from Avon Somerset Police and DI Upile Mtitimila, Cheshire Constabulary.

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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