Police reformer: Olivia Pinkney, national lead for children and young people's policing
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Derren Hayes meets Olivia Pinkney, the National Police Chiefs Council's lead officer for children and young people.
Olivia Pinkney has the tough task of turning the police service into a "children first" organisation. That is the overarching aim of the first National Strategy for the Policing of Children and Young People, which Pinkney, deputy chief constable of Sussex Police and the National Police Chiefs Council's (NPCC) lead officer for children and young people, helped compile and is responsible for delivering.
"We know young people who have not had much to do with us have huge confidence in us and see us as someone who can help them," says Pinkney, a graduate in mathematics from Cambridge University. "But where young people have had interactions with us in crisis, we know that feels very different for them. Often, we are taking away their liberty or sticking them in a cell because we can't find anywhere else for them to go."
For the group of children and young people who come into regular contact with police because of their behaviour, social or health problems, relations can understandably be strained. Consequently, improving relations with young people is one of the four priorities in the NPCC's strategy.
Published in early September, the strategy aims to tackle long-standing issues with frontline policing, but is also an attempt to get local forces and officers to take a more preventative approach to how they work with children and young people. That ethos has been welcomed by youth justice organisations and children's rights campaigners, but some have questioned whether it is realistic in the face of billions of pounds of cuts to police budgets expected to be announced in next month's Spending Review.
Pinkney accepts the police "offer" is going to be different as a result of the expected austerity measures, but says that tackling problems earlier will be key to police working under tighter budgets in the future. "You cannot take such huge percentages of budget out and not feel the difference and we have to be upfront about that," she says.
"If we can get an intervention right at the start, then you're cutting out demand for years to come. That does not mean (police) being pseudo teachers, but it does mean having a really good relationship with schools, so that police officers know where the worries and vulnerabilities are for children and families."
The national strategy highlights the key issues Pinkney and other police leaders want frontline services and staff to tackle over the coming years. One of these - the use of stop and search powers - cuts to the very heart of community policing and is often a cause of great resentment among young people from ethnic minority groups. For example, in some parts of London, young black men are 28 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.
"Stop and search is one of those very precious and powerful tactics available to policing, and it has a really important place in keeping people safe, but needs to be very lightly held," says Pinkney. "In recent years, the police service has had to take a look at itself to see if it is using it proportionally, no more so than with young people because they are vulnerable by the very nature of their age."
Lack of confidence
She adds that children and young people "don't feel confident" about the powers police have and how these can and can't be used. Consequently, the strategy calls for local forces to work with communities and young people to develop consensual stop and search policies.
"There are areas of the country where that is happening, but it is not everywhere yet," says Pinkney. "One thing we need to push is to get that good practice out there and encourage others to do the same."
The strategy also calls for a cultural shift in the way the police service interacts with looked-after children, so that officers make "every effort to avoid criminalisation of children in care".
To turn the strategy's aim into reality, Pinkney says a new understanding must be developed between the police and local residential children's homes and foster carers that ends the practice of officers being called out for minor incidents.
"Looked-after children are some of the most vulnerable people in society - life is really tough for them and they have faced some of the toughest challenges," says Pinkney.
"Police are called when things in a care home are quite troubled and angry, but that are often quite normal.
"The calls from children's homes can be in their thousands throughout the year. Some of that is really acute and concerning, but a lot of it isn't. I'm ashamed to say that we've had a young person arrested in my force area, not so long ago, for having a pillow fight. It is that kind of thing that we need to address."
She adds that part of the problem is that the culture of the police services is that if an officer is called, they feel they need to take action.
"They are being called because another professional says 'I need your help to deal with this formally'," explains Pinkney. "They are used to saying 'Yes, I can take that problem away'. What we're trying to say is if you're really scared or something awful has happened, of course, we will always come. But too often that is not what goes on.
"We need to work with that children's home to enable that child to stay there. We're not going to arrest them and stick them in a cell, we're not going to record a crime or put them through the criminal justice system.
"The police need to understand that has to feel very different. Equally, the children's home needs to think very differently about it.
"There's some great examples around the country where those relations with children's homes are starting to strengthen and both sides understand what they can and can't do and work together to address behaviours. But we need police officers not to think 'a crime has happened therefore I need to take formal action'. It's a huge cultural shift for us, but we must get it right."
Improving police training so that they are better at recognising how young people's trauma can affect their behaviour is key to delivering this shift in mindset. But she has been frustrated over the past year in her efforts to get more time on children's issues into initial police training.
"I'm not confident our workforce understands when a young person has trauma how that manifests in their behaviour," says Pinkney, "They don't need to be experts, but do need to have a good working knowledge. The College of Policing acknowledges that, but we haven't got any further because of a lack of capacity."
Knowing the cohort
The strategy also highlights the vulnerability of children and young people living in residential homes to sexual exploitation. Pinkney, who shares the child sexual exploitation (CSE) brief with her counterpart in Norfolk, says the best way for safeguarding agencies to protect looked-after children from such threats is to "know the cohort".
Helping agencies have "good conversations" when children return home after running away is important, she adds. "What we're finding in Sussex is that having a multi-agency perspective from the start is really informing our joint information and intelligence, ensuring our safeguarding work doesn't end up in a criminal justice outcome because we're preventing it going wrong in the first place."
She describes the CSE scandal in Rotherham as an "enormous turning point" in how the police view the issue. "The language people use and you hear in police stations is very different now," she says.
"From my personal experience, I've never seen it be a huge concern, but through the eyes of 2015, what I know looking back is we could have done better." She adds that safeguarding is "right up there" in terms of the police's priorities irrespective of financial constraints. "It will not get knocked off," she adds.
Reducing the use of custody for under-18s is the final target in the NPCC strategy. It is an area that great progress has already been made on - over the past seven years the number of young people in custody has more than halved. Despite this, Pinkney says more can be done by ending the use of police stations to hold under-18s overnight.
Part of the problem, she says, is that all too often police cells are being used as a fallback option when the local authority has no secure children's homes places available.
She explains: "No one wants a child in a cell overnight, but equally if there's nowhere for them to go because there's no availability, no custody sergeant is going to let them out.
"It's a very distressing place to be and not the place for a young person to be overnight. We're working really hard with the Ministry of Justice to try to fix that, but we've been worrying about it for a number of years and it's still a problem."
OLIVIA PINKNEY CV
- 2014 Deputy chief constable, Sussex Police
- 2013 Assistant inspector, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary
- 2009 Assistant chief constable, Sussex and Surrey Police
- 1991 Police officer, Avon and Somerset Constabulary
- 1988 MA in mathematics, St Catherine's College, Cambridge University
- She is also a trustee of Coordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse and sexual abuse survivors organisation Lifecentre Chichester