Building Safer Communities
This project will deliver the following:
Synthesis of Existing Research: A scoping study of the existing evidence base relevant to the pursuance of community safety. This endeavour will be structured according to two themes, namely: effective community safety interventions; and, the delivery (process) of community safety.
Impact Generating Activity: The materials generated by the scoping exercise will be uploaded for access on the Scottish Community Safety Network (SCSN) website. The project will also undertake a survey of the 32 community safety partnerships in Scotland. The survey will be designed to probe the information and training needs of each partnership, and will provide an overview of the range of current community safety interventions.
Placements: Four local authority community safety practitioners will be selected for placement in one of the host academic institutions. Each fellow selected for placement will be provided with access to the host institution’s teaching facilities. The focus of each fellowship will be the in-house evaluation (Demonstration project) of a specified community safety endeavour.
Seminars: The activities proposed for this project will support numerous seminars and the production of a range of web-based resources. These can be listed as follows:
- Building Safer Communities: the existing evidence base (Seminar and web resource)
- The Information and Training Needs of Community Safety Partnerships (Seminar and web resource)
- Current Approaches: ‘Practice Notes’ (Web resource:
- The Evaluation of Community Safety: demonstration projects (3/4 seminars)
Capacity Building: A sample of those community safety partnerships prepared to provide further information about their interventions (and identified by the survey component of this project) will be supported to produce a ‘practice note’. A ‘practice note’ will report the aim, mode of delivery, funding, monitoring practices, evaluation (where undertaken) and contact details of the project manager. The motivation to develop a ‘practice note’ series is drawn from recognition of the need for community safety practitioners to be able to share each other’s experiences. This exercise will be supported, where possible, by a ‘blog’ on the SCSN website.
Lead Researcher: Jon Bannister, University of Glasgow,
Contact: J.Bannister@socsci.gla.ac.uk
Lead Institution: University of Glasgow
Project partners:
