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Police Commissioners and the Voluntary Sector
It will be interesting to see if PCCs build on this promising start and make the voluntary sector a keystone of their work in tackling crime locally. They will face two substantial challenges over the next two years. Firstly, the outcome of the general election will have a significant impact.

Why can’t we record crime accurately?
“It is not the force which pays the highest price of crime-recording failures, but those victims and the wider community to whom justice may be denied. This can be especially true for the vulnerable, and those who suffer more serious crimes. Failure properly to record crime today may not only fail today’s victims; it places others at risk of becoming victims tomorrow.”

Young People and Stop and Search
Y-STOP recently publicised a useful infographic showing information about the number of young people under 18 stopped and searched in the year up to March 2014. Just 11% of these stops led to arrests and the Metropolitan Police carried out 39% of all stop and searches on young people.

We still imprison too many people for using drugs
You can see from the table that 281 people were sent to prison for possessing a Class C drug (Anabolic steroids, benzodiazepines, GHB, GBL, piperazines (BZP), and khat) despite having no previous convictions and a further 212 who had just one previous – bear in mind that 30% of British men have a criminal conviction by the age of 30.
Fewer criminals but more prisoners
This latest set of MoJ statistics adds power to the recent argument made by Professor Sean McConville (With Lois Blom-Cooper) that if we really want prison reform, we have to sideline politicians and have a Royal Commission.

The end of the road for cautions?
Police officers will use their professional judgement to assess an offence, taking into account the wishes of the victim and the offender’s history, in order to reach an outcome which best meets the needs of the victim and of the public. Of course, many police services have been using these community resolutions
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