POLICING IN 2012 AND BEYOND

To Leicester Town Hall early this evening for a public meeting with the Chair of Leicestershire Police Authority (Barrie Roper) and the Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police (Simon Cole). This is the first meeting in a series of four being held in different parts of the force area this month. The remaining meetings (all starting 1800) are:

• Wednesday 25 January, Harborough District Council, Market Harborough
• Monday 30 January, Rutland County Council, Oakham
• Tuesday 31 January, Police HQ, St Johns, Enderby

More than 50 people are gathered in the Council Chamber for the meeting, which is facilitated by Ben Jackson from BBC Radio Leicester.

In general terms, these meetings are being held so that Leicesterhire Police can listen to the public's concerns about the service they provide in these challenging times and so that they can clarify priorities, limitations and pressures and communicate information about new arrangements for policing and governance. Specifically, the meeting addresses two main topics:

• The budget for 2012-13, which will be set next month
• The new post of elected Police and Crime Commissioner

Election of a Police and Crime Commissioner for each police force area in England and Wales outside London will be the most radical change to governance of police in living memory. All the necessary information about this (including qualifications and qualities required of those who are considering standing for election to this post) is available on the Home Office website. The key dates for this process are:

• 15 November: election covering whole force area takes place
• 22 November: newly elected Commissioner assumes duties. Leicestershire Police Authority legally abolished on this date

Leicestershire Police Authority is responsible for managing the transition. Members of the public shouldn't notice the handover.

There are three members of Leicester Council of Faiths present this evening: our Chair, Cllr Manjula Sood; Director Gursharan Kaur Thandi; and Cllr Rashmikan Joshi. All three ask questions from the floor, on topics as diverse as how the ongoing cuts are affecting the daily life of officers on the beat, how the police are addressing religiously motivated hate crime and use of Asian language media outlets to attract wider support for meetings like this. A member of Leicester's Pagan community also spoke about the vulnerability of smaller groups which may be more likely to feel isolated and vulnerable, contrasting the local scene (mostly positive) with the national scene (not so), referring to a number of horse mutilations that have taken place in Cornwall and Wales and have been blamed on "witches".

Chief Constable Simon Cole takes a moment to focus on Hate Crime, with special reference to Leicestershire Police's Stamp It Out! campaign. He tells us that there were 510 recorded Hate Crimes in the force area in 2010, a number which fell closer to 400 in 2011. He reassures us that, "If you commit a Hate Crime in Leicester, Leicestershire or Rutland, we will catch you."

I've been impressed by how Leicestershire Police use social media in their workaday operations. They host frequent webchats, have a well-received and regularly updated Facebook page with over 14,000 likes and a constant flow of interesting and helpful information via several Twitterfeeds. It's a lazy cliche, usually put about by people who don't use social media and don't understand it (and perhaps, are scared by it) that it's a means for spreading misinformation, rumour and panic. In my experience, Leicestershire Police use it to quell those very things and do the opposite: they use social media to keep the public informed and involved. This was particularly the case during the visit of the English Defence League to Leicester in October 2010 and during the one evening when Leicester was brushed by the wave of social disturbances that swept much of England last summer, It's fascinating to see how social media is used at this meeting this evening. Chief Constable Simon Cole presents Leicestershire Police's review of 2011 in a video posted on their YouTube channel. Support staff are tweeting live the headlines from the presentations, then the gist of the Q&A session. As well as disseminating information about what's going on in the meeting, this allows interested parties not present in the room to participate through following the content, tweeting their own comments and questions and retweeting to their own followers. The hashtag for tweets sent from and about this meeting is #chiefandchair. Tweets from this evening's meeting are readable via that hashtag and it will be good for the remaining three meetings too.