Community Voices: (Working and Non-working) Relationships with the Police in the London Borough of Hackney

• In Event: Policing, Race and Communities in the UK

Abstract

This paper discusses community leaders’ views of their community members’ association with crime and contact with the police in Hackney, it also discusses community leaders’ working relationships with the police. Police representatives meet with community leaders in local forums, steering groups and consultations. These points of contact are the sites where such working relationships are established and maintained. One African, one Caribbean, two Kurdish-Turkish, and four Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Charedi) community leaders were approached for interviews.

This paper explores the role of ethnic communities in Hackney in directing both working and non-working relationships with the police through the lens of community cohesion and informal self-regulation capacity within their respective communities. It also examines shared ideas about the police by shedding light on social representations responsible for transmitting community histories related to the police. The interviews provide understanding of community mechanisms of social control and social support – the building blocks of collective efficacy – and their impact on relationships with the local police. The role of shared perceptions, whether of neighbourhood safety and crime or the police, is explored in an endeavour to explain minorities’ relationships with the police.

Author

• Maya Stavisky, University of Cambridge