VIOLENCE BY ANY OTHER NAME?

Back in September 2013, the Home Office commissioned HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for England and Wales to look at the way our Police Services deal with domestic violence.

The report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) has looked at how all 43 forces in England and Wales responded to domestic violence understandably does not make pleasant reading and contains some grim statistics.

It is time, I think to finally seperate the word ‘domestic’ from what is simply violence and to change the way offenders are dealt with. Serious consideration needs to be given to removing the reliance on initiating prosecution for the repeat offences from the victim to the Police Service, some preliminary work in this direction was done in Lambeth, by the Metropolitan Police Service in the 1990’s, but more work clearly needs to be done.  

While reform of the law in relation to domestic violence is long overdue, there has been some progress but we are continually confronted by grim statistics in relation to domestic violence. The HMIC report has criticised some aspects of the way both Gwent Police deals with domestic violence and the victims of domestic violence.  HMIC has accused Police forces of unacceptable weaknesses in relation to dealing with incidence of domestic violence and this despite domestic abuse being linked to 8% of crimes and police chiefs stating that abuse was a priority.

The HMIC investigation revealed that of some 600 domestic assault files, half did not include pictures of injuries - a standard piece of evidence for a prosecution. Police, the HMIC report noted, receive more than one million calls a year relating to domestic abuse and almost 58,000 victims - the vast majority of them women - were at risk of serious harm or murder.

The report stated that three women a fortnight were being killed by a partner or former partner and a third of all assaults recorded by the police related to domestic violence. In an exceptionally critical report, HMIC have said that chief police officers need to recognise that domestic abuse constitutes a major problem that demanded comparable resources and focus to those devoted to tackling other high volume crimes such as burglary.  The report noted that only eight out of 43 forces were responding well to domestic abuse.

HMIC noted that it had significant concerns about how Gwent Police responded to some victims of domestic violence, it noted where there had been improvements and made specific recommendations for improvement for Gwent Police. Historically our Police Services had a poor record when it came to dealing with domestic violence, with offences of violence in a domestic context being effectively written off. At the end of the day violence against a person, is violence against a person, the setting (‘domestic’ or otherwise) is irrelevant, it is an offence.

A MOMENT OF CLARITY...

I have been a regular visitor to the Royal Gwent to visit a close relative at various times pretty much every day over the last three weeks. This means that I have seen the hospital (and its surround) both exceptionally busy and reasonably quiet (trust me reasonably quiet is a relative term). Whilst visiting I have seen the ambulances stacked up to drop off patients and parked all over the place either waiting for calls or simply waiting for the next busy day.  

Stacked up ambulances at a hospital near you!

Now we used to have a network ambulance stations (and small hospitals) scattered across much of our country, but, most of them appear as far as I can see to have been sold off to cash in on housing boom prior to the turn of the millennium. This is no doubt a contributory factor to the problem of poor ambulance response times. Some three weeks ago it took the best part of three hours for an ambulance to arrive for a close relative and that was in the middle of our country's third largest city - heaven help if you life in a rural area or the valleys.

What might make sense would be for ambulances to be based out at our (surviving) network of fire stations, in a perfect world along with some of the our Police to be based with them. One result of the Con Dem inspired public sector cuts will be a sell off of police stations across our country so as sure as day follows night, they will need somewhere to go. Ideally a network of dispersed emergency service stations would help to ensure that response times and perhaps lead to better emergency service co-ordination  - just a thought!