Victoria Police looking to relaunch schools program in plan to bolster community ties




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Students at a Geelong school are already taking part in a pilot program. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)

Victoria Police is pushing to bolster its presence in schools with a series of new programs more than a decade after the last strategy was officially scrapped, but experts are split over whether it will build community relations or is a worrying intervention by the police force.

Details of the strategy will be announced later this year, but the ABC understands it will not be as comprehensive as the police in schools program that was around roughly 30 years ago. 

From the 1970s to 2000s, Victoria Police officers were routinely part of sports clubs, while dedicated youth-liaison police officers went to schools, formed a “lecture squad” that regularly visited primary schools, and hosted Blue Light Discos.

The last formal program for police in schools was scrapped in 2005, although officers have continued with informal visits in the time since at the discretion of local stations.

The renewed push is a statewide strategy and comes as Victoria Police Commissioner Shane Patton seeks to bolster the force’s relationship with the community, particularly after a sometimes fractious 2020 that involved lockdowns and record fines for people breaching the state government’s coronavirus restrictions.

While some experts say the initiative shows the police are changing their image away from a “military style” of enforcement, lawyer Anoushka Jeronimus, who is the director of youth programs at WESTJustice, says the idea is terrible and shortsighted.

“We’re worried such a program would target schools identified as having kids labeled as ‘troubled’ and ‘at-risk’, and lead to unnecessary interactions with police,” Ms Jeronimus said.

“The police in schools program was reviewed and it was clear it should not continue and previous police commissioners have not supported it.”

She said it would be better to put funding into civil, legal and mental health education in schools.

“It’s confusing — they [police] can be friendly, but they won’t be your friend if you commit a crime, they will charge you.

“Ultimately their role is law enforcement and placing police in schools creates a conflict between law enforcement and the social aspect of school.

“If the aim is to develop trust between police and young people, this would be better achieved through police being better trained to interact with young people like de-escalating conflict, unconscious bias and understanding the ages and stages and impact of trauma.”

Ms Jeronimum added there were other professionals that could be more beneficial to send into schools.

“Get the builders out there, the carpenters out there, engineers, people who can make these kids feel good about themselves and see their lives beyond the detention centre,” she said.

“That’s the aspiration you want to fuel kids across the state and there are so many ways you can do that, not with police in schools.”

Good idea, but ‘white bread’ police force needs to change

Criminologist Richard Evans said while the formal police in schools program was pulled around 2005, senior sergeants in local stations had continued to bolster their relationship with schools on their own.

He said it was an old idea, but a good one.

“It has borne happy dividends over the years and this is particularly true in schools in disadvantaged areas where students are among potential young offenders,” he said.

“Overall, they’ve been a good thing and served to break down the suspicion and distrust between at-risk youth and police.

“The core principle remains the same — you have police acting as mentors and reaching out in particular to young boys and young men who are your likely offender.”

However, Dr Evans said there were different ways to approach the concept.

In particular, he would like to see an emphasis on female officers and officers from minority communities when the program was relaunched.

“Very much one of Victoria Police’s issues is it is very white bread. It tried to recruit from migrant and other minority communities without a great deal of success,” he said.

He also said the idea could serve as a way to change Victoria Police’s image from “military” and “warrior police” to “community”.

“I have grave reservations about some of the choices Victoria Police have made in recent years,” he said.

“In particular, their uniforms — a change to a dark blue uniform and the glock stuck to their thigh.

“The message sent by the current appearance is dreadful and intimidating. It makes you fearful, it even makes me fearful. I feel nervous about approaching them — it’s not an inviting, inclusive look.”

Ultimately, the issue was one of identity, according to Dr Evans.

“I don’t think Victoria Police knows what it wants to be: crime fighting and anti-terrorist or the friendly local copper,” he said.

“I’m pleased about this [police in schools] because it shows they are trying to engage more with the community than perhaps they have.”

’99 per cent of police solving crime is information from the public’

Justice expert Rick Sarre from the University of South Australia said bringing police back to schools was likely a tactic to encourage more police reporting.

“It’s trying to engage young people with police in order to open up the lines of communication,” he said.

“Ninety-nine per cent of police solving crime is when they have information from the public, the idea that officers are running around dusting for prints is about 1 per cent of all good policing.

“So if you haven’t got those lines of communication because people think the police disrespect them or are nasty, communication breaks down, and then police struggle so they have to do things like stop-and-search.”

Professor Sarre said the strategy could change how people, particularly teenagers, perceive the police.

“Having a 13-year-old see police as human beings and as people they can trust is a stroke of genius,” he said.

Professor Sarre said the police in schools program was pulled when the police began to be perceived as too friendly and when crime was seen as “out of control”.

In turn, that led to officers “being seen as unapproachable, nasty and racist”.

But recent high profile court cases in the United States involving police brutality coupled with the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia and overseas has likely pressured Victoria Police into switching tact once again, Professor Sarre said.

“It’s a bit of a public relations exercise,” he said.

“A lot of it has to do with the growing multicultural nature of Melbourne, if not every city in Australia.

“It wouldn’t surprise me that they will have a Muslim police officer, a Sudanese police officer, young women police officers, they will not be fronting up with five white male 27-year-olds.”

Children approaching police station after successful pilot

A pilot program is already running in schools throughout the state and is expected to be included in the initiative. 

Blue EDGE [which stands for education, develop, grow, empower] is a health and fitness program run by the Blue Light Foundation and Victoria Police that sees officers volunteer two mornings a week to take part in fitness training and a group breakfast alongside students.

Corio’s Northern Bay College is the only school that’s part of the pilot in the Geelong region and although it had a rocky beginning, teachers and police officers say it’s been a huge success that’s had profound impacts on students’ lives in and outside the classroom.

After four months, they say students have created a trusting relationship with the officers and the program has come a long way since it started.

Steven Lewry is a teacher at Northern Bay involved in the program and said “day one was horrible”.

“It was no good,” he said.

Leading Senior Constable Alecia Spalding said the officers were lucky if we could sit with them for breakfast.

“We asked them: raise your hand if you like the police and no one put their hand up. Raise your hand if you’ve got a bad rep with them or if you’ve had a bad situation with them; all the hands went up,” she said.

She said now the kids recognised and chatted with the officers if they saw them outside school.

“I think from day one to now, the relationship has completely changed,” Leading Senior Constable Spalding said.

“Kids’ perception of us as police members was not good, because that’s how they’ve either been brought up, grown to know through the media, but they just think police are bad.

“But now, they’re actually getting that police are real people. They want you to sit with them at breakfast, they save you a chair.”

Goldsworthy campus principal Erin Prendergast said the program was adopted to try to change students’ perception of police after some had negative run-ins with officers.

“I’m highly conscious of not highlighting the cops are in and out of kids’ home around here all the time,” she said.

“There is a small percentage of our students that, for whatever reason, believe the police are against them and we wanted to jump on that and demonstrate that’s not the truth.”

Police say the trust these kids have in the officers has extended beyond the schoolyard.

One Year 7 student arrived at Corio Police Station outside school hours after being assaulted and asked specifically for an officer who had visited the school.

“If it wasn’t for this program, he wouldn’t have turned up,” Leading Senior Constable Spalding said.

The children at this school aren’t strangers to police, with some having encountered officers on their doorstep to arrest their parents.

They’ve seen friends and siblings arrested on the street and some are frequently visited by officers in response to family violence incidents.

“They’ve probably been on the outskirts of an incident, it might have happened at a stake park where they just see the police uniform rock up and separate or take people away and they think we’re all bad,” Senior Sergeant Janet Gleeson said.

“These kids need to know we’re not just about enforcement. They can come to us for advice and to learn life lessons. They can come to us for help.”

Source: Thanks msn.com