Brent Council answers Full Council Meeting questions from the public

Questions from the public will ne answered for the first time at the Brent Council Meeting tomorrow. The answers have been published in advance in a Supplementary Report which I have posted below.  It also contains answers to questions from Councillors and reports from the two Scrutiny Committees.

Over-confident police have more misconceptions about legal policing issues than the public

The general public know more about issues critical to policing then than the police themselves, according to new research conducted by an academic at London South Bank University (LSBU).

Researchers examined misconceptions of legal issues by law enforcement officers compared to the general public’s knowledge on these topics. The research is the very first study to look at these misconceptions in the UK.

Dr Julia Shaw, Senior Lecturer at LSBU, and Parole Officer Chloe Chaplin provided 44 police officers and 56 members of the general public questions on several topics relevant to modern policing.

The study – published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology – asked participants to complete an online questionnaire comprised of 50 true and false items. The questions covered a range of legal topics including police procedures, dealing with mentally ill people, and eyewitness memory. Participants were asked to rate their confidence in each of their answers on a 5-point scale from one being the most confident to five being the least confident.

Despite direct involvement and relevant experience with the subject matter, the study found that police got more of their answers incorrect than the general public. Police got 39% of their answers wrong, whilst members of the public made only 37% of errors. However, police were found to be 4% more confident in their responses than the public even when wrong.

Dr Julia Shaw said: “Overconfidence is a common characteristic in professional industries, as there is an assumption by professionals that they must know more about their own topics than outsiders. However, when applied to policing, this can have severe consequences for our justice system.

“This research shows that British police do not know enough about things like how eyewitness memory works, how to effectively question suspects, and what kinds of services offenders have access to.

“While public beliefs about issues relevant to the legal system have been demonstrated to often be wrong, this was the first study to look at these misconceptions in policing. It is expected that the research will be used to inform police training in the future.”

Preston Community Library is Alive and Kicking - get down there and join in

From Preston Community Library Campaign

Preston Community Library is now open. There is a selection of newspapers, and books available to borrow. The creative writing and Scrabble groups continue to meet on Monday afternoons, and there are now English classes on Fridays as well as Mondays.

This Wednesday, 29 April, Samantha Warrington will be holding her first yoga class, and she's hoping to add weekend classes for parents and children in the very near future. Wednesday's class will be from 7.30 to 8.30; participants need to arrive by 7.15 to register. If you'd like to join either of these classes, please ring Samantha on  07801 697712.

We're planning to add healthy eating classes, knitting classes, a homework club and a community cinema very soon. If you're interested in any of these, let me know.

At the moment we are open to the public from 12.30 - 7 on Mondays and from 11-5 on Saturdays. We want to extend these hours very soon. To do so, we need more volunteers to staff the library, and we're holding a meeting for potential volunteers in the library building this Wednesday, 29 April, at 2pm. If you have some spare time and would like to contribute to the success of a really important project, please come and see us between 2 and 4 on Wednesday.

Finally, this evening sees our next pub quiz at 7.30 in The Preston. Fortunately enough, I've just finished writing it. We aim to start the quiz promptly at 8. We hope to see lots of you there.

Brent scrutiny proposals elaborated

I have received further details of the way Scrutiny is intended to operate under the new Brent Council arrangements from a reliable source. They seem to go beyond what is actually in the papers going to Full Council on Wednesday.

There will be 8 members of the Scrutiny Committee withs its work programme co-ordinated by a single Chair. The Chair will be empowered to form sub-committees and task groups to examine particular policy areas and developments.

The Chair will be able to invite any member of the Council, apart from the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, and who are not in the Cabinet,  and 'notable citizens' outside the Council to sit on the sub-committees and task groups.

The seven other members of the Scrutiny Committee will serve as chairs of the sub-committees and task groups as well as contributing to the main Scrutiny Committee.

The claim is that this will give more members of the Council and the public an opportunity to get involved in scrutiny.

The Scrutiny committees will take place on a monthly basis rather than the present quarterly  meetings and the full committee will meet the week after Cabinet meetings.

I also understand that there are proposals for the creation of deputy cabinet positions so as to involve more of the large Labour group in policy making.

On the face of it this clarification (or is it a revision?), seems to go some way to addressing concerns about the lack of scrutiny in an 'almost one party' Council but  the proposals still look rather vague and the method of choosing committee members unclear. It will be the detail, and the people on the committee/s, that will have to convince the sceptics.

Will Brent Council continue to leave the public out in the cold?

It will be interesting to see what happens at tonight's Full Council Meeting regarding the admittance of the public.

The November 2012 Council Meeting passed the following Procedural Motion:

Councillor Butt moved a procedural motion stating that it was with considerable regret and sadness that following advice received from the Director of Legal and Procurement, in order to enable the proper democratic meeting of the Full Council  to take place, he had felt it necessary to exclude a number of members of the public who had previously caused such disruption to Council meetings and meetings of the Executive to the extent those meetings had not been able to continue without moving to another room and thereby restricting the rights of the public to observe the proceedings. Councillor Butt added that he would continue to require officers to work to find a better solution than excluding members of the public from the Town Hall.
RESOLVED:
that the exclusion from this Full Council meeting of members of the public who have caused disruption to the previous Full Council meeting and/or to the previous  meeting of the Executive and/or the Budget and Finance Overview and Scrutiny Committee be endorsed.

 It seems that the democratic right to make a protest is in conflict with the Council's need to meet undisturbed to pass policies with which members of the public profoundly disagree. Recent there have been demonstrations, including occupations at Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham councils as they approve more cuts. Other Councils seem to manage dissent better and as I pointed out in a recent blog Barnet Council provided an over-flow room with a TV link to the council chamber when the public gallery was full during a very heated confidence debate.. I wonder if the Civic Centre has been designed so as to maximise public access to meetings?

The present policy does pose a s number of questions:

• What does the Council constitution say about the right of the public to attend meetings or the Council's right to exclude them?
• How does the Council define disruption?
• How have they identified those they wish to exclude?
• Have they provided their private security guards with photographs of the excluded?
• If so have those who have had their photographs taken been informed?
• Does the Council have a database of the persons concerned?
• Is the Council or their hired security guards entitled to ask for proof of identity/proof of address from members of the public wishing to attend a Council meeting as they did at one such meeting last year?

A wider consideration is the need to consider why the public feel excluded from, and frustrated with, the 'democratic process'.  This has not only been been anti-cuts protesters that the Council probably see as the 'usual suspects' but solid middle of the road citizens concerned about the closure of libraries, sports centres, day centres and regeneration projects. The disaffection stems from consultations that turn out to be done deals, Executive meetings that rubber stamp decisions already made in pre-meetings, an Opposition that seems ill-prepared and flying by the seat of its pants, and full Council meetings with no real power but reduced to an arena for political jesting and grandstanding. As with the House of Commons it sometimes appears to be a cosy club despite political differences. 'Us against them' becomes councillors against their active citizens.

Misconceptions about welfare