Viewpoint: John Carnochan - Campus cops provide a positive role model for our young people
Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, Head of the Violence Reduction Unit, corrects some common myths about campus cops.
As with so many other good ideas, campus cops developed as a practical solution to an existing issue. A lot of police time is taken up with calls reporting young people playing truant, or concerns from shopkeepers about the volume of young people hanging around takeaway shops during lunchtime. They were not necessarily doing anything wrong, but there was a need to curtail boisterous behaviour and to reassure shopkeepers and locals.
We have always had police officers acting as school liaison officers, and campus cops emerged as a natural extension to that. The first two were based at Northfield Academy in Aberdeen and St Mungo’s Academy in Glasgow, and we now have 50 campus cops spread across Scotland. The decision to recruit a campus cop is one for the headteachers, local authority and divisional commanders. There is no suggestion that the schools with police presence are violent or unruly schools, but if their catchment area is an area of high deprivation we know that young people are more at risk of becoming the victims of crime or of becoming involved in criminal behaviour. From a policing perspective, often when we encounter young people it’s in a conflict situation – for instance to move them on or to stop and search them. The campus cops initiative gives us an opportunity for positive engagement. It encourages young people to see police in a different way, to see that they’re just people who can help them.
In recent decades, the trigger for intervention has become criminal justice – you need to do something really bad before we do something about it. And yet teachers know that the warning signs are there much earlier. The basic principle of campus cops is that of early intervention. We want to catch the drama before it becomes a crisis.
Setting an example
By making police officers available in schools, we can work together to provide vulnerable young people with the support they need. Campus cops liaise with the headteacher, depute headteacher, social workers and child psychologists, so that we’re looking at the whole issue and asking ‘what do we need to do about this young person’s behaviour?’ It’s only proper that the police exchange information with schools where it’s relevant. It’s important that we understand a pupil’s domestic background so that we know what challenges they face and how to help them.
The presence of a campus cop can also be very reassuring. We can help stop boisterous behaviour from escalating into bullying and victimising often simply by being there in the playground or by walking some pupils home from school. Our campus cops are often approached by pupils who want someone to talk to other than their teacher. Hopefully, by enriching the school environment and making it feel safer, we can also put teachers’ minds at ease and reduce the amount of absence caused by issues like anxiety and stress.
Campus cops will also deliver appropriate inputs regarding issues such as road safety, cycling, drugs or even knife crime. They offer a different perspective that can be more meaningful than simply providing training packs for teachers. The only place where we can directly influence young people in this way – the only place where we have a captive audience – is school. There, we have the opportunity to shape things, to add to young people’s education in the broadest sense. We’re saying that there’s more to education than technical skills and academia. There are also broad life skills and understanding that prepare young people for meaningful jobs, relationships and lives. Education is recognising this through the holistic approach of Curriculum for Excellence. Teachers teach,and yet they also set an example, and so do our campus cops. We hear a lot about anti-social behaviour but it’s not a useful term. We shouldn’t dither about until we’re defining what not to do. Instead, we should provide meaningful examples of pro-social behaviour such as cycling, drama and volunteering.
Our campus cops deliver that in a very individual way. For example, some of our officers have links to Blackburn Football Club, and take the pupils to see a match every second Saturday, and our officer at St Mungo’s raised money for bikes to take the children cycling. We have an officer with an interest in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards who can get young people involved in that and we’re about to train all our campus cops in the Prince’s Trust XL programme. For many pupils, campus cops are the only positive role model in their lives other than their teachers.
We’re not Batman
In the main, the reaction to campus cops has been very positive. Once people see the real benefits – falling truancy rates, less vandalism, real understanding – they welcome it. Of course, there are still some misconceptions to overcome. We are not asking teachers to be ‘grasses’. That’s a very misguided notion, since 90% of the time we’re the ones supplying information to the school, not the other way around. We are not patrolling the corridors, listening outside classrooms for signs of disruption then bursting through the doors like Batman!
A Canadian criminologist once said: ‘less law, more order’. Too often we blame all the problems of society on young people, but their behaviour is learned behaviour. From where do they learn it? Far from waiting to slap on the handcuffs, we are trying to create an open dialogue with pupils. In many ways, we’re returning to the old fashioned notion of the cop – not as someone driving by in a patrol car and only getting involved in confrontations, but a friendly face in the community who people know and trust. An officer on the street may bump into 30 or 40 young people a day, but a campus cop will meet up to 1,000. That’s the kind of positive engagement that builds bridges between schools, the community and the police force.
Our campus cops advocate mutual respect, understanding and empathy, and it’s already having an effect. At St Mungo’s, 12 pupils have applied to be police cadets – the first applicants in the school for 20 years. That’s progress we can all take pride in.
CV
Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, QPM, is Head of the Violence Reduction Unit. John joined Lanarkshire Constabulary in 1974 and has spent most of his 33 years’ service as a detective. He was until 2004 deputy head (Operations) of Strathclyde CID, where he was head of the Serious Crime Squad and Fraud Squad and responsible for all matters relating to abduction. John became Head of the Violence Reduction Unit in 2005 and was recently awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.
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