By Stephen Riley and Gemma Buckland. 

  Building Bridges, Safer Communities is a project delivered by Revolving Doors, in partnership with Shared Future CIC. The specific purpose of the project was to design a participatory process for public safety and resourcing, including developing a community-generated definition of safety in Merseyside. Merseyside as a region, with a particular focus on Liverpool, was chosen as the geographic focus for this project due to its unique history as an area with a strong sense of shared identity and culture, and a rich tradition of activism and innovation. The project had a particular focus on groups and communities who are traditionally not included in discourse around public safety. In particular, this focused on people with experience of multiple disadvantage. This was defined as a combination of contact with the criminal justice system, homelessness, problems with drugs and alcohol, mental ill health, and/or poverty. We wanted to better understand how safe people in Merseyside feel, what could help make them feel safer, what the role of the police is in making people feel more or less safe, and how relationships between the police and communities could be improved.

This report captures learning from one stage of this project, which is the peer research conducted by Revolving Doors. Peer research was conducted to shine a light on what feeling safe means to people in Merseyside—with a focus on the City of Liverpool and Birkenhead— and what people felt the police’s role should be in helping people feel safer. Research themes were defined in part from initial polling conducted across Merseyside with Opinium, by perceived gaps in existing knowledge, and where local stakeholders such as the police, local authorities and others, felt more information would be most valuable. This included a specific focus on the ‘revolving door’ cohort of people caught up in a cycle of crisis and crime because of unmet health and social needs, and what impacts their perceptions of safety. A reason for this was our expertise in engaging with this group and, in our experience, the high levels of mistrust of authorities which can make successful engagement with them more difficult. The Opinium poll took place online between 18 and 27 January 2023 and focused on public safety and policing in Merseyside. Over 1,500 people responded from across all five boroughs. Where relevant, findings from the polling are explored within this report in relation to the peer research findings.   

London: Revolving Doors, 2024.   40p.