There has been extensive coverage in the past few weeks of the emerging proposed approaches to justice and safety in England and Wales with commitments to put more police on the streets, increase use of stop and search, and incarcerate more offenders with longer sentences. The idea is that these proposals will reduce crime, deter offending and therefore make people safer.

As an organisation that feels passionately about community safety and evidence-based decision making we wanted to challenge the narrative that these are activities that will reduce crime (they don’t) and which will make people and communities feel and be safer (they won’t). We’ve been thinking about what makes a safer community as part of our work stream on ‘Making the Case for Community Safety.

Read the Briefing Paper in full here.