Christmas and Street Angels reflections

This started as a reply to Kez Lama's post on the subject, but became too long and I felt in the end it would be inappropriate to post as a comment. I also wanted to be able to post these reflections here as they were interesting to write and are relevant to this blog. It's also relevant to my earlier post about Street Angels.

It's really about professionalism in different contexts, and about trust, so it should make sense:

From an anti-capitalist and anti-christian perspective, but as someone who is dedicated to different experiences of community and sees ritual and ceremony as important parts of life, christmas is a strange time.

I had a similarly communal and voluntary experience, and I've enjoyed many christmases with various diverse groups of people over the years. This year I spent the day with Urban Space again. I really felt I spent the day with lots of old friends, and they really are friends, even though I've met most of them 'professionally' through their lack of capacity to deal with problems in their life and their involvement with local services and support groups. The great thing was its unpretentiousness. Everyone just seemed to feel free to be themselves, and happy to be together talking and having fun.

I also enjoyed being a Street Angels volunteer, meeting other volunteers, talking to people in the streets, joking about Ru and the Bishop going into Wildcats, and seeing that we clearly provided a useful service that should continue. It was interesting to be in the city centre at that time of night but not being out, as it were. I usually like to think I'm quite aware of what's going on around me when I'm out (I've had a few lapses), but wearing that huge fluorescent yellow coat, coupled with our responsibility to be observant and learn how to blend in and operate effectively still impressed a new perspective on me. I think the main observation I made was that life on Westgate is actually much more safe and enjoyable than I expected. I'm not so sure about the music policies generally, but I'm much more likely to go out in Wakefield after this experience (and avoid the hassle of travelling to Leeds).

I think my conclusion as I write this is that perhaps we should understand professionalism as a sort of stealth movement... That if we are professional enough at our work then the 'professionalism' should become invisible, disappear: whoever we are working with will feel comfortable, should see us as just another (albeit friendly) person, and feel that it's worth their while talking to us; the more familiar barriers of professionalism, often including a mixture of suits and formal clothing, jargon and other formal language, potentially multiple caveats about what we do, who we are, confidentiality and when we break it, complaints procedures, equal opportunities policies, etc., and other more personal barriers like never accepting a cup of tea, not liking dogs or being vegetarian — all these other professional barriers should disappear. Then our dislike of dogs is dealt with professionally and unobtrusively and no one even notices, we will be able to sense when it would be appropriate for our client's comfort to accept a cup of tea from them, and we will be able to slip in the necessary bits about confidentiality exactly at the right time so it's not too mechanical and can be listened to and understood... Maybe we can't get there yet, but it seems to be a reasonable direction to try to head in.

Now is the time to reflect on the experiences of Street Angels, to think about how we worked, what worked, where the gaps or problems are, and how we respond to all this and prepare to start again. I'm sure you and I are not the only people to recognise the specific role Street Angels volunteers found themselves in, and I feel there is an opportunity to capitalise (if I can use that word) on this experience by encouraging volunteers to 'blend in', to be able to give professional support when required, but to make the people they are working with feel comfortable with whatever support we're giving them.

The other thing that comes with this approach is trust. Blending in requires intuition and flexibility, and people will practice it in different ways that suit them, but trying to regulate this in formal procedures doesn't really work. I don't really see this as a big problem though, as we already have a pretty good team of reliable people and we know we can work together. There are various points for discussion, and I think the idea at this stage is to have another Sunday afternoon gathering soon where we can all share feedback and start to plan for the future. Hopefully we can find a way to build on this experience and support and develop our good practice rather than impose too many procedures and expectations that may only serve to create more unhelpful barriers before the people we're trying to work with.

I can't finish without saying something more about trust. Many people say we are living in a less and less trusting society, I don't know if this is true but it certainly seems trust is an attitude that is sorely missing. I see it in the police, who spend so much time being lied to they hardly know anything else and rarely seem able to trust people; in benefits agency and job centre plus staff who are under pressure to stamp out benefit fraud; from mental health professionals who are constantly doing risk assessments; from social workers who think advocates are going to complain and make their lives a misery; from service users who are so used to the veil of objective professionalism and the repeated disappointments over the years that anger often comes out instead of trust... the list goes on.

The sad response to the lack of trust today is often to add more layers of bureaucracy and professional and moral policing to try to cover for the lack of trust, but surely it's obvious that not trusting people breeds distrust and untrustworthiness. On the other hand trusting someone almost always helps to make them feel at ease, and the more responsibilities you trust them with the greater their chance of growing in confidence and skill. Once you trust people, management becomes a collective process of observation, feedback and analysis that provides its own safeguard and lets project coordinators identify issues and resolve them.

Hopefully Street Angels will be able to continue to capitalise on its trust in people and get back out on the streets as an effective and satisfying experience for everyone.

Police issues resolved

I had a positive meeting with representatives of the Police on Friday, together with key members of the Advocacy Action Committee. This stems from a post I wrote on this blog on 14 April which was removed shortly thereafter and replaced with this note.

Amongst other things this note says that the Police were threatening legal action, and it is now necessary to provide some clarification and closure to this issue. It was my intention to republish the post at this point as the information it contained is still valid (see below for how). For a variety of reasons however I have decided to just write a summary of events.

Four days after I started this blog I received an email about a young Kurdish man who came to a youth group in some distress saying he'd just spent the night in a police cell, he didn't know why, and he thought the officers had been racist. This was a reply from a colleague to a request I'd sent out for things to write about. I published the email with some identifying information removed and some background information to put in in context, then I emailed various key people working for the Police, the Asylum Team, the Community Cohesion Advisory Group of the local strategic partnership, and others. On the first working day I received two emails from a police officer which I published in a comment to the original post, with some disparaging remarks about their investigation.

On 20 April, two days later, a senior police officer contacted one of the Advocacy Action committee members and said they were very unhappy with the allegations contained in the post, and in particular with the fact that I'd named an individual officer. They additionally felt that the blog could be a risk to community safety, and requested for it to be removed and for an apology. This was done immediately, together with a number of other changes to clarify that the blog was my personal work and was not a project of Advocacy Action's.

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I just want to make some remarks at this point on the four areas of continuing relevance, community safety, complaints, and finally racism.

Continuing relevance
The Police have investigated the original story, and they are convinced that the allegations were unfounded. They can't find any evidence of an arrest or custody, and in fact the cells in the Police Station we identified were taken out of service years ago. There were also other discrepancies in the story, although it is true that the man's door was broken down in the course of an unconnected investigation.

I still have a different perspective on this issue, as do the other people who have spoken to the Kurdish man (he hasn't wanted to speak to the Police). I won't go into the objective details (see my post Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity) because I'm interested in a more person centred or community focused approach.

Firstly the man was upset when he arrived early at the youth group, and he was clearly upset about the police. This may not be a legal issue, and it may not be an issue for a formal complaint, but he is still upset about the police, and from a person-centered perspective this is an issue that deserves some attention. It's also important that he wasn't trying to gain anything from telling his story, apart from some kind of catharsis probably. He never wanted to make a complaint (I stressed this in the original post). He was simply upset and he told the youth workers what happened to help him calm down.

From a community perspective there are also important issues. I have heard that there have been several similar incidents already in the last few months, and not only the Kurdish community, but also the professionals who work with them are talking about this. Several other people have also come up to me from the English community and told me about similar things that have happened to them, and one person told me that when they tried to complain the police had no record of their detention. This is all circumstantial, and can't be verified, and I'm sorry if the police are upset for a moment about me writing this, but this is what the community are saying, to each other at least. This is not an insignificant issue, for the community or the police, but it seems to me that the lack of corroborable evidence makes it difficult for the police's systems and approaches to deal with.

Community Safety
As I have already mentioned, the police were concerned that the content of the blog could have an impact on community safety within and around the local Kurdish population. I listened to the police's concerns on Friday and I don't want to detract from them, but from the perspective of this blog devoted to ethics and communication this is another opportunity to explore and think about why I disagree with them.

The first thing I said was that I've been trying to encourage people in the refugee and asylum seeking community (and others) to complain if they have a grievance for years, almost completely without success. The reasons people don't want to complain are quite worrying really, certainly disempowering, and do lead to an already vulnerable group of people becoming even more vulnerable in some ways.

Basically people just don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to challenge authority in a way that might cause them more problems. People think that if they complain they might be beaten up, evicted from their properties, or even deported from the UK. I remember one story of illegal working came to light after a man asked for the £20 pounds he was owed for his 10hr shift, only to be beaten so badly and kicked down the stairs that he had to be hospitalised: in the face of this kind of threat which illegal immigrant is going to complain? Another occasion a man went with his brother-in-law (who is incidentally a Home Office registered interpreter based in another part of the country) to report a racist assault, but when his details didn't come up on the computer he was taken into custody for 5 hours while his immigration stutus was checked: the assault was never reported.

The other reason is that this is already what they expected pretty much. This is how they expect to be treated by the police, and it's much better than their own coutries where summary beatings are carried out with rifle butts. England generally is much better in many ways, or at least it's where they want to be at the moment, so they will work for £2 an hour, they will turn their backs on low level racism, they will accept the various trials that come their way. There is a mixed story here: many people like working with refugees because of their strength and humour in the face of adversity - some of them are role models for us all. On the other hand why should people suffer unnecessarily, especially when there are laws and social expectations of good practice that are meant to protect them?

Even today with my more distant relationship to the refugee community I hear quite a lot of stories going round. And the reaction of the community to this story of being detained overnight by the police? People aren't exactly indifferent, but they're not very impressed either, it doesn't seem like a surprising or serious matter to them.

I think this is the real community safety issue, and I'm sorry but I can't see anyone who might threaten community safety taking the time to read through this blog (although I wish they would, they might change their ways). How can we address these issues? The first thing has got to be being able to talk about what's going on, or to read about it, and certainly to think about it. There are lots of organisations who are actively working towards making our communities safer places to live, but this story, and this blog, suggests that there are some continuing issues that need to be looked at in a different way if we are going to effectively deal with them.

Complaints
No complaint was made in this case: neither the Kurdish man, the Police, nor I made a formal complaint. I've already said that Complaints are great, but the practice of them often is not, so in many ways I'm glad.

The Police do have a statutory complaints procedure providing initially for a local resolution of minor complaints, or through the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for more serious matters.

I've been lucky to have been able to do quite a lot of thinking about complaints over the last nine months, and lucky that it's been in the context of a multi-agency group writing a code of practice. In the light of this experience, and knowing the issues with making complaints under other statutory procedures including that for Social Services and the NHS, I can't help thinking that the proper police procedure is still inadequate in some ways and for some situations.

The main problem is the unwelcoming bureaucracy: if we are going to encourage people to feel that complaints are great, we need to be more open and encouraging about the process, and we need to be going out of our way to support people to make more complaints. This system isn't very encouraging though, and as with many complaints procedures it is tiring and difficult for the complainants.

I also can't help thinking that while the police are very good at investigating crimes, the process of investigating a complaint is quite different, as are the potential outcomes and methods of redress for upheld complaints. I feel that the police culture and experience of investigating crimes is actually a barrier to the sympathetic handling of complaints. It would be interesting to do some research about this perhaps.

Racism
Racism is a very emotive word, and probably not something to put in a headline on a blog. Since these events I have written some thoughts about Racism and discrimination. Racism is a very important issue for me, and I have many friends who experience it at different levels. At the same time however I don't think we should be too upset by it - we need to talk about it and work against it and concentrate on moving on.

The Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry provides one positive step in this direction (see here for background), with this definition:

A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.

This definition takes us in two directions which is not all without problems, but while it opens up many more incidents to be counted officially as racist (a relief to the victims), it also takes the focus away from the perpetrator of an incident and away from the criminal law, placing it instead on perceptions and feelings.

In this way we can see that someone may act in a way that they think is positive, but which others may percieve as racist. The Macpherson definition allows a debate to go on around these borderline examples without undue pressure being exerted on those who would previously have been considered 'alleged criminals'. The analogy I tend to draw is with that state of 'marital bliss' where the loving husband (it can work in all sorts of combinations) offers help to his wife: he is just being nice; she thinks he's being patronising (or, why can't he offer to do some of the dirty jobs, or what's his ulterior motive, or...). The point is in this common situation between people who know each other well there can be and quite often are quite different interpretations placed on people's actions.

At least one of the officers on Friday was upset at my implication that police officers could act in a racist way without knowing it. This was seen as a slur on those officers' professional practice, but actually it was meant as a softener, a reminder that even if I agreed with the Kurdish man that police actions had been racist, it was those actions that were the problem, not the individual officers. It was also an indication that there was a learning opportunity here and I wasn't simply going to throw allegations around.

Conclusion
At the end of the meeting we discussed some ways that Advocacy Action could work with the police in future. Obviously I promised not to publish individual officers' names on my blog (although anyone is welcome to publish my name as I work in the community).

More positively we did think about some of the experiences with the police that the community are talking about, and how we can address these issues in a more proactive way.

We thought about developing some simple guidance for young refugees or asylum seekers who may have dealings with the police.

We agreed to pick up the phone more, talk to each other about any issues that come to our attention.

Some hopefully this debate will continue in more practical ways, and I am certainly feeling positive about this outcome.