'Soft target? Hard sentence' leaflet

Shared by Ian Rathbone, former Hackney Council staff

"Hackney Council and the police had not spoken to one another for years, publicly not speaking because of the murder of Colin Roach. As time went on there were others who were beaten up by the police, harassed by the police, or murdered and the police did little about it. Endless stuff going on. So they weren't talking to one another.

So we arrived at 1998, and there was a concern in the mid 1990s that crime needed to be dealt with, you know, something needed to happen. Crime Concern is a charity that came in and they acted as a kind of a bridge, that was part of their thing. I was working in the Communications office so I agreed to work with them part-time. We thought well we need to run a campaign, we need to show the public that the council's doing something about it, rather than the police.

We decided that street robbery was a big thing. So I say the way I’d like to run this campaign is to get them all in one room. So I get the police, youth workers and community workers (the community workers weren't talking to the police either) and one of the council officers. Just get them all in one room and then just give them some questions: What would you do about Street robbing? How would you beat it? What processes would you use to do that?

So we've actually got them in a room, so I just said ‘Come on, let's all forget who we are. Let's just think of ourselves as people who are opposed to crime on the streets, because it's a big thing that's going on. But what it did was people did start talking to one another so we got this campaign going.

I ran a competition throughout the borough’s schools for posters, gave them the idea this is a poster designed to stop street robbery, how would you address it? One of the ideas which became the iconic poster was a window with bars looking out on blue sky, and underneath it just says something like ‘the life a street robber has got to look forward to.’ And the idea was this is the consequences of your action.

When the crime results came back for that year, street crime had been reduced by about 22 percent, so that meant one in five robberies were reduced. And they’d actually caught quite a few as well. So this was a real action from a PR campaign. We won national awards for that.

But the other thing that happened was that we were able to establish the community safety department in the council, which was the council taking over some roles, prevention mostly. You know, working with the police, so that barrier was broken. I think it led to a lot of building a relationship with the community as well, because in the end you can't overlook Colin Roach, I certainly don't. But on the other hand you know you've still got to carry on trying because of all the future young people, stop young people becoming involved in crime. So part of that all came from that street robbers campaign."

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