Our director summarises key points from the latest Women’s Independent Advisory Group meeting, including the response to the policing of events on College Green and learnings from the latest domestic homicide review.
Following the protests that took place on 16 June on College Green, issues were raised online and via email to Bristol Women’s Voice, which the police were asked to respond to. Submissions were distilled into the following key themes relating to policing on the day:
- What Public Order Strategic Threat and Risk Assessment was done in advance in response to information shared before the event?
- Why wasn’t more effort made to keep the groups apart?
- Why were women asked to leave the pub in small numbers to avoid further confrontation rather than action being taken against those acting aggressively?
- Has there been review of policing that day? What was learnt?
- What will change in future?
Police response
The police stated a full scrutiny panel was convened to look at the details in full on 25 July (minutes have been sought and will be uploaded here as soon as we have them).
Members of this panel are looking at all footage available and speaking with a variety of commentators/experts.
In the meantime, the police provided the following information:
- Notifications about gatherings of people who have a view they want to share publicly, come under our protest policing remit/guidance. This being so, we start to scan open-source information to gather intelligence before an event e.g. how many likes posts are getting, how many people say they will be there, what the conversation looks like. We scanned this information in the usual way.
- We spoke to the commanders and the intelligence team in Manchester where there had been a similar event recently to ask about their learning and experience.
- We assessed the numbers we thought would attend and allocated resource on this basis, and devised a policing plan.
- We seek to facilitate peaceful activity at these events where there is a continuum of behaviour and a fine line/tipping point between peaceful and not peaceful activity.
- On 16 June, there were more people than we anticipated and we had to manage the situation with the resources available.
- Re: keeping the groups apart: to start with the didn’t see the black masks and the aggressive behaviour because both groups were mixing.
- Once they became apparent, an attempt was then made to separate the groups but it wasn’t as successful as people would have liked.
- There will be further scrutiny with external commentators and the findings will be shared. This panel convened will hopefully be on-going to see events in future being scrutinised in this way.
The scrutiny panel took place on Monday 25 July.
Domestic homicide review analysis
In summary, there are 16 DHRs open in Bristol currently, some dating back to 2018. Police members stated that a lot of the learning is being fed into the wide-ranging Domestic Abuse Matters structural change training programme being developed and delivered by Safe Lives. This is being rolled out to 3,000+ officers.
The police use DHRs to identify and build on good practice as well as address poorer practice.
Themes that are emerging:
- Multi-agency sharing of intelligence, particularly regarding weapons.
- Information-sharing between the Police and GPs.
- Referral pathways into mental health.
- The ongoing need to reduce focus on the victims and to focus on perpetrator actions.
- Specific feedback for officers and general cultural change work to reduce victim-blaming and gender bias. This is specifically covered in the training being rolled out.
- Learning around elder victim abuse.
- Learning around child-to-parent abuse.
- Intergenerational abuse.
You can read the full report here.
