We need to do more to make young people feel safe, police chief says
More needs to be done to stop young people using knives, despite a 20% drop in serious youth violence and knife-enabled robbery, the new chief constable of West Midlands Police has said.
Speaking to a group of 16 to 21-year-olds at The Way youth centre in Wolverhampton, Scott Green said tactics like stop and search, focussing on street robberies and being "relentless on pursuing offenders" had contributed to the fall.
However, knife crime and youth crime figures were still too high, he said, but cited early intervention and education as key factors in helping young people not get involved.
Green answered questions on topics including diversity of officers and the influence of AI on the force.
He was speaking to a group of "Changemakers", young people from across the West Midlands, supported by the Positive Youth Foundation and funded by the West Midlands Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP).
Asked by audience member Deroy how early intervention could stop a young person picking up a knife or getting into a violent situation, Green said it was about engagement with schools, education providers and social care.
"Where we think there is a young person who is vulnerable, particularly to being exploited into crime, trying to take those steps as early as we can, working with others and parents to try and divert that young person away from committing criminal offences," he said.
The 20% drop had taken place over the past three-and-a-half years, which he said was "significant".
Police Crime Commissioner Simon Foster, who was also being questioned by the group, said the starting point "always has to be prevention, prevention, prevention" and highlighted the work by the VRP, which helped steer people away from crime.
Green was asked by Ikjot if the force had failed people of colour. He denied it had, but acknowledged more needed to be done to recruit people from all backgrounds which was happening.
"If you're a person who is black or black heritage, and particularly a man, you are 2.1 times more likely to be stopped and searched than somebody who is white," he said.
"Now it was 2.9% in the West Midlands, and we've worked really hard to bring that down."
He said diversity within the intake of student officers was much higher, although it was predominantly from people of Asian heritage.
"We still struggle to recruit black people and black heritage people into policing to the same numbers," he said, citing "complex societal issues" among reasons behind that.
Green said a race action plan was looking at the confidence gap "between how confident in particular, black communities are in policing than other communities".
"And we have to keep doing that. I am encouraged by the diversity of our intakes now," he added.
Audience member Cala asked how concerned the police were about AI, misinformation and deep fakes.
Foster said he was "deeply concerned" and welcomed government regulation plans to ban under-16s from some social media platforms next year.
Green said almost every crime the force dealt with had a "cyber element" in gathering evidence, as so many people had mobile phones.
"I think probably today, most of us can look at something and say 'I don't think that's real. I think that's AI'," he added.
"I imagine in six months' time, 12 months' time, three or four years' time we'll be looking at things on AI thinking 'We've got no idea whether that's real or not'."
He said that was a significant challenge in society, as well as in policing, as it could affect the ability to prove something in a court of law.
When the force received letters of complaints about officers, he said they were often now 30 to 40 pages long as people had used artificial intelligence to create the letter and the "AI noise" meant it took up more time to deal with.
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