The Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP), have coordinated with community groups to realise the ‘Fund Communities (not policing)’ document in response to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority approving an increase in policing precepts.
The NPMP have workedalongside groups like Greater Manchester Living Income Campaign, Migrant Justice Manchester and a community centre to outline concrete ways the increase wouldbe better spent within communities instead of policing.
The precept increase is expected to raise an additional £15.5 million for Greater Manchester’s police service, according to the GMCA. This translates to a £15 increase for Band D council properties.
For example, a community centre outlined how 48 similar centers could be funded for a year with £14.4m.
More community centres may reduce crime levels at the root cause
Scarlet Harris, a member of NPMP, discussed the importance of coordinating across grassroots groups when opposing such precept increases.
She explaned how grassroots organisations have a ‘really good sense of people’s actual needs’ and can therefore be seen as a platform for the residents of Greater Manchester to ‘offer an alternative’.
By funding these community groups, who are at the ‘frontline of community work’, social harm is more likely to be reduced than if funding for the police is increased, Scarlet argued.
She said: “When the police turn up harm has already been caused. It’s a reactive response to social harm; it doesn’t deal with it at its root and doesn’t prevent harm from happening”.
Most crimes are ‘crimes of poverty’, she added. Community groups, with increased funding, could therefore reduce crime levels through tackling issues of poverty.
Was the consultation process biased?
52.49% of people who responded to a consultation on this issue opposed the increase in policing precepts. Despite this, the Greater Manchester Police, Fire and Crime Panel approved the increase.
The NPMP claims that, during this public meeting to vote on this issue, critical voices from the public were threatened with removal.
The NPMP have also argued that the consultation process for the increase in policing precept was structurally biased.
They outlined how participants had to indicate support from a list of police priorities. Participants could not continue until they had selected at least one option. This meant that people weren’t able to say ‘no’ to a tax increase without creating data that could be presented as support for policing.
The group pointed out that many points on this list of policing priorities, like tackling drug addiction, or reducing gender-based violence, may be better tackled through investment in communities rather than the police.
Scarlet said, in this issue, the GMCA has been, ‘willfully ignoring the public and in some instances intentionally manipulating public participation’.
“This is meant to be a democratic process but as we know it isn’t a democratic process”, she said.
Should we tackle crime as it happens or at its root cause?
Whilst the GMCA presented the police as an antidote to many of the social harms outlined in the consultation, Scarlet argued that the police actually cause a lot of these harms. She said:
The police actually are a cause of a lot of harm. We know that in all sorts of statistics, whether that’s to do with the harms of stop and search practices and the racial disproportionality in that practice or the ongoing harms caused by police pursuits in the city.
Chair of the Police, Fire and Crime Panel, Janet Emsley, said:
The Panel agreed to endorse the Mayor’s proposal to increase the police precept because we believe it is right that our police have the resources they need to do the job we expect them to do and make the improvements HMICFRS has asked of them. We want the public to have confidence in policing in Greater Manchester so we need to give them the tools to do that and keep our Community safe.
The GMCA argues that even with the increase, the Greater Manchester police and crime precept will remain one of the 10 lowest out of the 42 police and crime areas of England. Yet, the NPMP, alongside community groups they have coordinated with, argue that this money would be better spent supporting community projects that tackle social problems ‘at their root’.
Greater Manchester Police press office was approached by email, both by the author of the piece and by North West Bylines. Bylines re received an automated acknowledgement of receipt of said email, but no comment or reply to the statements in the article.
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