POLICE AND CRIME – Policing in the communities
Labour Manifesto 2017:
Last year, there were an estimated 6.1 million incidents of crime experienced by adults in England and Wales. Almost every police force in the country recorded an increase in crime, with worrying rises in some of the most violent offences, including gun and knife crime and homicide.
On Theresa May’s watch, police numbers have been cut by 20,000. Cuts to the police force endanger communities and endanger police officers too. Labour’s approach to policing crime will be different.
We will support the police in the performance of their duties. We will provide officers, police community support officers and civilian staff with the equipment and people they need to provide effective policing services, including from the growing threat of cybercrime. We will work with them to ensure that our communities are safer, for all of us.
We will champion community policing policies and incentivise good policing practice, working with Police and Crime Commissioners throughout the country on strategies to prevent crime. We will also work to eliminate institutional biases against BAME communities, that mean you are still far more likely to be stopped and searched as a black or Asian man.
Labour will recruit 10,000 more police officers to work on community beats, equivalent to at least one more for every neighbourhood in the country.
We will ensure appropriate support is provided to victims of crime and introduce legislation for minimum standard entitlements to service from criminal justice agencies.
The level of violence against women and girls is not acceptable. Labour will emphasise the safety of women and girls by appointing a commissioner to set new standards for tackling domestic and sexual violence. We will establish a National Refuge Fund and ensure stability for rape crisis centres. We will make age-appropriate sex and relationship education a compulsory part of the curriculum so young people can learn about respectful relationships. We will strengthen the law, banning the use of community resolutions as a response to domestic violence.
Labour will continue to enforce effective measures to prevent all forms of abuse, including female genital mutilation.
Security and counter-terrorism
Labour will maintain the cross-border security co-operation agreements with our intelligence partners in Europe and beyond. We will always provide our security agencies with the resources and the powers they need to protect our country and keep us all safe. We will also ensure that such powers do not weaken our individual rights or civil liberties.
When – as they sometimes will – these aims collide, the exercise of investigatory powers must always be both proportionate and necessary. We will reintroduce effective judicial oversight over how and when they are used, when the circumstances demand that our collective security outweighs an individual freedom.
Labour will review the Prevent programme with a view to assessing both its effectiveness and its potential to alienate minority communities. In doing so, we will address the government’s failure to take any effective new measures against a growing problem of extreme or violent radicalisation.
