Stop & Search is quite a controversial issue amongst Southwark youth. Whilst it is realised that Stop & Search may be necessary, (especially with the rates of knife crime on our streets), it is also clear that there is an uneasy relationship between young people and the police in the borough.

About a year ago Southwark Young Advisors were commissioned by the Metropolitan Police to deliver Stop & Search training to the 900 Police officers within Southwark. It was a tall order, but also an amazing opportunity to give the police a young person’s perspective of their experience of Stop & Search and, hopefully, to improve the interactions between police and young people in the future.

We first conducted a survey amongst young people in Southwark about their experiences of Stop & Search. From the information this produced we were able to create a training programme that we felt reflected the views of young people within Southwark and which could tackle the issues that were highlighted in our survey as being important

We delivered our first 10 training sessions in March to officers who already had experience of working with young people in schools etc, to ease us into the task, (especially as training police officers seemed an intimidating task at the time). This also gave us the opportunity to hold a discussion with the delegates in which they provided us with constructive feedback with which we could improve our training.
All 10 training sessions were enjoyable, the delegates were friendly, vocal and easy to interact with, and we got a lot of positive feedback from them.

As a direct result we are now looking forward to rolling out our training to the rest of the borough.

Towards the end of November we were also given the first dates for our new training programme.

To prepare for this we held a couple of practice sessions at the beginning of December and, on 8 December delivered our first proper training to police officers who work on the streets, and who regularly conduct Stop & Search on young people.

The training session itself however was a lot harder than I had anticipated. The police officers were as unsure of us as we had been of them, and it took a lot longer for easy conversation to flow and interaction to increase than we thought it would. It was also a lot harder to get the police delegates to take on board our viewpoints and understand the training. But eventually, towards the end of the session, and after a considerable amount of discussion and debate, a better understanding was established between us and the police.

Whilst I am now more nervous about the training than I had initially been, I realise that we, or at least I, had begun the training with a rose-tinted perspective of what to expect. However, although it may not have been one of the easiest training sessions that we have delivered, it was definitely the most constructive. We can now amend our training accordingly, and be better prepared for the next session. JM

All blogs represent the personal viewpoints of the writers themselves and do reflect the opinions of LT&RC or it's policies.  

 Other blogs:

Terry Bowen + Emanuel Candengue + Denise Fermor