Bexley Youth Council

Crime & Justice

The Crime and Justice group aim to:

• Improve the image of young people
• Link with Police and build relationships with them
• Make Bexley a safer place for young people

We meet regularly to discuss the issues young people come across in the borough to help try to tackle these issues.

Here are some of the projects we have worked on and things we are going to do in the future:

Intergenerational Meeting

Young people from all over the borough were telling us that they were concerned about the perceptions that older people have of them in Bexley. To deal with this concern, we organised a successful ‘Intergenerational Meeting’, where we met with older people to talk about and listen to each others views. We talked about crime in the borough, how safe young and older people feel or don’t feel and what each others views are of older/younger people. We plan to make a permanent link with the pensioner’s forum so that contact and meetings between us can continue.

Racism DVD

The Crime and Justice group are currently working with Pointless Taxi Production to create a DVD targeting racism. This will be shown in schools and youth groups all over the borough. This DVD is ultimately going to encourage young people to reflect on why their own behaviour, the impact this has on people around them and also to remind them that they are their own person, not to be dictated to by others. We want to make this different but original, so that people stay interested and are actually affected by it. Our members are going to be as involved as possible, on and off of the screen!

The DVD will be available to watch here on the website once it’s finished!

Links with the Police

We try to meet regularly with a member of the Police force. We have met with the Borough Commander- Tony Dawson, Superintendent Bagg and Chief Inspector Steve Murrant. In these meetings we have talked about issues such as stop and search rights- where we gave our views on behalf of young people in Bexley. We have also talked about making transport safer for young people, the role of PCSO’s and school officers and how we feel the Police should react to the recent fatal incidents in the borough. In the near future we are going to participate in an Independent Advisory Group and Scrutiny panels which question Police methods and strategies for dealing with youth crime in Bexley. We will also be able to suggest new initiatives in order to improve relations between young people and Police as well as helping to keep crime rates down.