Evaluation of north inner-city community safety partnership finds respondents unsure if it made the area safer

An evaluation of a pilot project to trial the partnership approach to promoting community safety found mixed results.

The government set up the North Inner City Local Community Safety Partnership in 2021 to bring together Gardaí, social services, drug services, local residents, and public representatives to brainstorm and oversee ways to tackle anti-social behaviour and crime in the area more holistically.

The government published the final evaluation of how that went on 7 October.

The results: members of the new group felt it had succeeded in improving relationships between different agencies and organisations.

But only 12 percent agreed with the statement “the LCSP has improved how safe the local community is”.

Commentators say the partnership does valuable work but that it needs more time, money and staff to get results.

“We believe that a multi-agency, multi-stakeholder approach to community safety is the only way forward,” says Noel Wardick, CEO of Dublin Community Co-op, an alliance of 13 community development organisations in the inner city.

But it will need more resources than the pilot of the North Inner City Local Community Safety Partnership got, to be effective, Wardick says.

The same partnership approach was also piloted in Waterford and Longford, and before the final evaluation – was published, the government decided to roll out the model across the country.

The Department of Justice didn’t respond in time for publication to queries sent Monday about what changes, if any, are planned based on the final evaluation, and whether it will increase funding for partnerships in more disadvantaged areas.

Majority satisfied across three pilots

Researchers from the University of Limerick and the Centre for Effectiveness Service asked people involved in the three pilots – in Waterford, Longford, and Dublin’s north inner-city – about their experiences, at the start of the pilot in 2021, again in 2022 and at the end of the pilot in the summer of 2023.

The respondents were representatives of community organisations, drug services, residents’ groups, state agencies like the HSE, Tusla and the Gardaí, as well as local business, community and public representatives.

“Of the estimated 79 members (excluding Chairpersons) on the LCSPs at the time of the endpoint survey, 34 completed the survey yielding a response rate of 43%,” the final report says.

The researchers supplemented those responses with focus groups attended by 12 partnership members, as well as one-to-one interviews with partnership chairs and coordinators, local authority representatives and An Garda Síochána representatives, it says.

The final evaluation took place from June 2023 to September 2023.

Across the three pilot areas combined, the evaluation found that 74 percent of the people involved in the partnership believed they were more beneficial in managing local community safety issues, compared to the previous stakeholder forums, the joint policing committees.

Each partnership was tasked with creating a community safety plan to reflect the priorities of the community and service providers were to be accountable for fulfilling the agreed actions identified in the plan, according a Department of Justice policy paper.

“The majority (77%) are satisfied with their community safety plans and (63%) are satisfied with the actions their LCSP has taken so far to address community safety,” says the report.

Give it a chance

When detailing survey results, the report disguises the three partnerships as Pilot X, Pilot Y and Pilot Z.

However, the North Inner-City Community Safety Partnership published its community safety plan in September 2023, after the final evaluation was completed, which indicates that it is Pilot X in the report.

Drilling into the survey results for Pilot X, there were several positive results.

Among them, the majority of survey respondents – who were members of the partnership – said that the partnership succeeded in bringing people together, connecting them and getting them to trust each other.

For example, most respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “the LCSP has improved working relationships between different agencies and organisations in our community”.

Most also agreed that the community safety partnership was better than the previous structures and was a valuable use of time.

Eddie Mullins, the former governor of Mountjoy prison, took over as chairperson of the partnership, in the pilot’s later days in May 2023.

In May 2023, Mullins said that the community safety partnership could have an impact if it was given a chance to work and that it could take around five years to demonstrate that it can yield results.

“We won’t change the world but we could chip away at the social issues,” he said.

The partnership will work at improving the environment in the north inner-city, linking up all the relevant agencies, and promoting sports and well-being programmes, as well as training programmes and other opportunities, he said.

Diverting one young person away from a life of crime is a success story, said Mullins.

The north inner-city can’t police its way out of its problems, says Wardick, CEO of Dublin City Community Co-op.

“Policing is a key part but not the only part,” he says by phone on Monday. Wardick sits on the board of the local community safety partnership and backs the rollout of the model across the country.

The partnership provides a valuable forum for inter-agency collaboration, sharing of ideas and innovating, he says.

“The small number of staff are doing trojan work,” he says. The previous chairperson and the current chairperson have both put a huge amount of time and energy into the voluntary role, says Wardick.

What needs to change?

For Pilot X, which appears to be the North Inner City, many respondents were unsure whether the community safety partnership had improved the sense of safety in the community, improved actual safety or made services more accountable to the community.

Most respondents (63 percent) told the researchers doing the final evaluation that they were unsure about the statements, “the LCSP has improved the sense of safety in the local community” and “the LCSP has improved how safe the local community is”.

Twenty-five percent of respondents disagreed with those statements, while only 12 percent agreed with them.

Half the respondents said the partnership didn’t have sufficient funding, while 25 per cent thought it did.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said it didn’t have enough staffing to do what it set out to do, while only 12 percent said it did.

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, who is involved in the partnership, says she supports the approach but that major changes are needed for it to work. “If you don’t do basic things it won’t work, full stop.”

Horner says the partnership requires a substantial budget and that it needs a  senior civil servant to coordinate it.

“If you can get the seniority of the people right, if you have someone in the coordinator role who can command the attention of the stakeholders in the area, then I think you’ve got something that can work,” she says.

If the partnership doesn’t have a substantial budget, then each of the partner agencies should be obliged to commit a budget to it, she says.

Under the outgoing joint policing committee (JPC) structure, meetings were held in public and the role of the Gardaí was to present information about crime and other issues and be accountable to the committee, she says.

“You are losing something by getting rid of the JPC structure,” says Horner, so you need to be certain that the partnership is better.

The role of the Gardaí in the partnership is a bit unclear, Horner says. “The relationship with the Gardaí is ambiguous at the moment.”

At the moment the superintendent sits on the board, she says, which is good. She thinks that local community guards should be sitting around the table because they have in-depth local knowledge.

“What we have said from the very start is that what is most critical is that it is resourced,” says Wardick, if it isn’t then those who are currently invested in it could lose interest, he says.

The partnership cannot be expected to work miracles, he says. “There is no magic pill.”

Where there are high levels of crime and on-street drug dealing, it’s usually a very disadvantaged area. “Until the root causes are tackled the problems will persist,” he says.

“The state has persistently underfunded areas like the north inner city compared to what is required,” says Wardick. “Ultimately if the state doesn’t invest in the necessary resources, it won’t work.”