The Mayor of West Yorkshire discusses the recently launched Violence Reduction Partnership.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 It's a really great day because we're at the Kallisangam in Bradford and we're
00:05 launching the violence reduction partnership. It was called the violence
00:09 reduction unit but this is more than just a name change, this is a whole new
00:14 approach of partnership working. Now the government said to partners such as
00:19 probation and health you have got a statutory obligation to tackle serious
00:24 violence so now working with them having this partnership approach I know we can
00:28 get more done to keep those young people safe in West Yorkshire. Over the last
00:32 year alone 3.3 million pounds has been spent on early interventions and
00:37 reaching out to 14,000 young people to stop them getting into crime in the
00:42 first place and then of course potentially becoming victims of crime
00:46 because for every single young person that is affected by crime what a loss to
00:51 our community and when I became mayor I made it my my absolute focus to make
00:56 West Yorkshire safer not just for women and girls but for all of our community
01:00 it's what we deserve and it's what we're worth. This is a team effort, it's a team
01:06 sport, I can't do it on my own. West Yorkshire police can't arrest their way
01:10 into a safer community so given we've seen so many cuts to our police this
01:16 sort of partnership work getting there early having those interventions before
01:21 people become victims and criminals that's the way to do it. So we work with
01:24 anyone from the year five to year six and then working with them into a safer
01:29 transition into year seven so those that are at risk or have been identified as
01:33 vulnerable we're also working throughout the whole of secondary school as well
01:36 mentoring doing a 15-week school program group work and assemblies bringing
01:40 awareness to county lines weapons awareness in secondary school in
01:45 primary school we're doing weapons awareness and gangs. I think the new
01:48 launch of the name changing its partnership I think is going to be more
01:51 beneficial for more helping more young people within within our region. I want
01:56 to reassure the public as well that the work that we've already been doing with
02:00 the violence reduction unit has also had impact so we have seen knife crime
02:05 falling we have seen the numbers of people admitted to hospital with a stab
02:12 wound or a sharp object wound actually fallen by 20% so we know that these
02:18 interventions really work so we're just going to see the deepening of those
02:21 statistics we wanted to go in the right direction we want it to reduce as much
02:26 as we can violent crime in our society. Anybody that's concerned about their
02:30 young people or violence and crime in their society please please do report it
02:36 to the police because only by getting that data can we and that clustering of
02:41 data can we then allocate resources. I know that the Chief Constable and
02:45 myself both want to see more police officers on the street more bobbies on
02:50 the beat but with the cuts to policing there's only a certain limited amount of
02:54 resourcing however if you report it and then it becomes a bigger issue then you
02:59 get the resources so please please do report that's 101 or online as well.