Attending a recent ‘work’ social event I met a man who runs a charity which gets prisoners to help other prisoners learn to read. The level of literacy amongst prisoners is astonishingly low and yet literacy, education, is perhaps the major factor in giving people the ability to control their own destiny. Our conversation moved on to the role the police can play in helping people we pull into the criminal justice system who are unable to cope and perhaps give them some more options, some more skills, to survive.

One of the innovative teams that we have just launched in Haringey is an Integrated Offender Management Unit. One aim of this unit is to engage with the most prolific and troublesome offenders who can be offered a real opportunity to resettle and rehabilitate. The collaborative working of professions from different areas of the criminal justice system (the probation service, the local authority, the prison service, youth teams, etc) trying to support offenders through the criminal justice system so that they come out of the other end with more support than they had when they started their journey is an important and worthwhile aim. Not only does it help prevent reoffending, but it helps offenders reintegrate back into society in a much more positive way than they may otherwise be able to do. It gives them a better chance to be able to re-engage with the community.

This sort of community engagement work by the police is not your traditional model but with the recent publication of damning reports into police practice nearly twenty years ago and more, the need for community engagement by the police in all its forms is essential.

One phrase that has gained popularity in recent years when talking about community engagement is that used to describe some sections of our communities as 'hard to reach'. This is a euphemism for people for those sections of our communities who are perceived to be too difficult to engage with so we find a pejorative label to excuse our lack of desire, and effort, to try and better understand their concerns and their potential to contribute.

On analysis and reflection of our history of police public engagement, it seems to many of us that one section of society that has been consistently hard to reach, and at times hard to engage, has actually been us - the police. If we really going to seize the opportunity in London that both highly critical reports offer us, we must be absolutely certain that we are not the ones that are hard to reach, or hard to engage.