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The third, and final, part of my Face The Public presentation. Again, at 9 minutes it isn’t short, but it is annotated so you can jump right to the bit you want.

A few things. First, I need to give a photo credit to diamond geezer for allowing me to use and adapt his photo of Wandsworth Prison.

Second, is that obviously the end is totally irrelevant to a YouTube viewer. You won’t be given a copy of the assessment when you leave the room, and you won’t have the opportunity to ask questions of the panel. However, you do have the opportunity to ask me questions or just let me have your thoughts. You can get in touch via any of the ways listed on my contact page.

Finally, if you want, the slides are available on SlideShare:

Face The Public 2010

View more presentations from jamescousins.
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The second of my Face The Public presentation. OK, it’s a bit long, at nearly ten minutes, but the video is ‘annotated’ at the front so you can jump straight to individual sections.

This section contains a brief outline of the priority setting process, last year’s priorities, acquisitive crime, serious violent crime and community reassurance.

I should also give credit for the photo of the police helmet to the Metropolitan Police, via their metropolitanpolice flickr account.

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Interested in crime in Wandsworth?

Well, you might be interested in the video. It’s the first part of my presentation to the ‘Face The Public’ meeting we are required to hold every year. Since we are meant to use the meeting to present our priorities for the year, but these are invariably so high level as to be meaningless. So I’ve tried to explain the reasoning behind them as well as using it as an opportunity to detail some of the work we do as part of them.

This video is the introduction, it sets the wider context and addresses some of the negative publicity we have had over the year. I’ll be editing together and uploading the remainder of the presentation over coming days (depending on time).

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The annual Crime and Disorder ‘Face the Public’ meeting takes place a week today and I’m currently trying to sort out the presentation for it. The more I think about it the more I realise it’s one of those public meetings that can we can so easily get wrong, turning what should be a useful and interesting evening into a rather turgid and overlong night out for all concerned.

We are required to hold it every year to present the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership’s proposed priorities for the years ahead. We can then take on board any comments before the priorities are finalised. But the problem is that the priorities are proposed after a fairly lengthy of analysis of crime and disorder in the borough over the past year (and beyond).

To convey all the work in a short(ish) public meeting is impossible. I tried last year, providing a lot of statistical and mapping data, but looking through the presentation again I cannot imagine what possible use anyone gained from it: it was simply too much data for people to take in. And this is before you start considering the evidence behind things that aren’t proposed priorities – very often why you choose not to concentrate on something is as important, or even more important, than why you chose the other things.

To complicate matters even further, the very top level priorities are a bit motherhood and apple pie. You can almost boil it all down to just a statement ‘we want less crime’. It’s the underlying issues and the the associated action plans that make the difference, but there simply isn’t enough time to cover all the work of all the partners involved.

It’s a balancing act – providing enough information that it’s useful in someway, without overloading people.

My current intention is to try and illustrate the links between the very high level priorities and what that means for local residents: so the high level priority on acquisitive crime, for example, results in initiatives like burglary aftercare on the ground.

But I thought I would try and ask people what they would want to see (no obligation to attend) from such a presentation. I did it last year on Twitter and got a lot of useful feedback, even though not all of it could be incorporated, so I’m going to try again on a wider scale. If you have any thoughts then leave a comment, drop me an email or a tweet.