Supporting delivery of the Serious Violence Duty in Birmingham

We are pleased to publish the Birmingham Community Safety Dashboard - Serious Violence Strategic Needs Assessment.

 

 

This dashboard has been created in partnership with Birmingham Community Safety Partnership, West Midlands Violence Reduction Partnership, West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council’s Insight, Policy Strategy Team to support the statutory Serious Violence Duty and its requirement to identify, tackle and reduce serious violence locally.

 

What is the Serious Violence Duty:

The Serious Violence Duty (SVD) was introduced by government through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, to commence on 31st January 2023. The duty places several requirements upon local areas and includes agreeing a local partnership arrangement to lead on the duty, agreeing a definition of serious violence, having consistent data sharing, analytical processes to produce a Strategic Needs Assessment at regional and local level; and a Strategy to set out how the duty will be implemented locally.

 

Who is responsible for leading on the duty:

The Birmingham Community Safety Partnership (CSP) through its Violence Reduction Board leads on delivery of the duty in Birmingham.  At regional level, it is the responsibility of the West Midlands Violence Reduction Partnership. 

 

Research shows that publicly available crime data lacks detailed specificity of protected characteristics and geographical areas. The majority of studies and reports available focus on ethnicity and crime using broad ethnic categorisations and do not tend to include a fine-grained analysis according to location. They almost invariably dedicate their analysis to patterns in England and Wales.​

 

Research also shows details of crimes, including protected characteristics of victims and suspects, can help support agencies, organisations and services to provide necessary and valuable support to victims, recognise the challenges of the justice system and influence policy decision makers.

 

For the first time, through partnership working, we have aimed to address these limitations of crime data through the Birmingham Community Safety Dashboard. The dashboard is broken down into the following sections: 

 

* Introduction 
* About Birmingham 
* Violent Crimes
* Other Crimes
* Hate Crimes and Weapon Crimes
* Modern Slavery
* Key Drivers of Crime
* What works in violence prevention? 

 

It provides a comprehensive understanding of crimes reported in Birmingham - providing breakdowns (where available) of different crime categories; protected characteristics (age, gender and ethnicity of those who are suspected to have committed an offence; victims of crimes; and vulnerable groups who may be subject to violence or harm) and by geographical (ward) area. As a result, it provides a clearer understanding of the local drivers of serious violence and vulnerable cohorts.  

 

In relation to data, it brings together a range of public datasets, service level data from West Midlands Police and research conducted by Crest Advisory Group.

 

The value of the insights that can be generated from the dashboard cannot be underestimated. It provides a solid evidence base from which partners, communities, policy makers and researchers can refer to, to take steps to tackle serious violence across Birmingham. It also supports the Community Safety Partnership’s priority of preventing and reducing serious violence and allows relevant stakeholders to develop deep insights that can create tailored solutions for Birmingham.

 

This is the first version of the dashboard which will continue to be developed and refined through ongoing feedback. Upcoming versions will include additional sections and data relating to serious youth violence and vulnerable children. This will provide a richer understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks of young people in relation to serious violence. 

 

Authors:  

 

Waqar Ahmed, Assistant Director of Community Safety and Resilience, Birmingham City Council 

 

& 

 

Simon Foster, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner. 

 

 

Working in partnership with: