Supportive Reporting

by Laura Huey, Professor at University of Western Ontario

See or listen to this interview with Professor Huey on the Quality Policing Podcast.

Here’s the part of the above video that is cued up and most directly related to to this essay.

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“I’m not going to rat on anyone. I’m scared of the consequences”

“I have a fear in me. For when they get out.”

“I wouldn’t be believed”

“It will get worse.”

“I could get that cop who is going to turn on me”

The focus of the articles in this collection is on crime and violence reduction. What some might be less aware of is that discussion of crime counts typically refer to the volume of crime that is reported to, or otherwise recorded by police. There is, however, something which criminologists refer to as ‘the dark figure of crime’. This figure represents the amount of crime that is never reported and is therefore unknown and uncounted in official statistics. From the standpoint of creating violence-prevention programmes and public policies, crime that is unknown, generates little, if any, attention. Or, put another way, ‘no public interest, no funding’.  

None of the above is to say that researchers haven’t made attempts to delve into this ‘dark figure’. Victim surveys are one such tool, helping us to gain insight into not only unreported crimes, but also the factors underlying what is often termed ‘a failure to report’ by victims. However, when it comes to understanding the size and the scope of violence plaguing marginalized communities, these surveys have significant limitations. In the neighbourhoods in which I have worked, victims do not have an address or, in some cases, even carry a cell phone. Thus, members of some of the most victimized communities are also not among those typically represented in victim surveys. Their experiences of violence remain unheard and therefore generate little social response, particularly in a media-saturated world in which the latest ‘big crime’ draws the attention of both public and policy makers. How to get marginalized victims to come forward?    

Twenty years ago, I started a project to explore the different styles of policing in three marginalized communities in Canada, U.S. and Scotland. I focussed on the homeless, the precariously housed, and the LGBTQ+ communities. I observed massively high rates of violent victimization – at the hands of both those from within and outside communities in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool.

I’ve documented men and women reporting random acts of violence by strangers – every type of loathsome behaviour imaginable from threats to beatings to stabbings (Invisible Victims). People spoke of finding themselves the target of hate-based crimes, having objects thrown at them from passing cars or people running up to them on the street and launching a physical attack.

Women, in particular, have horrific experiences of violence. Gillian, whose story I have told before in my book, Becoming Strong, was kidnapped by a “date”, who raped and tortured her over a period of three days before she was finally able to convince him to let her go. Other women had similar stories of being choked or pushed out of moving vehicles. Some of the violence related is the result of being forced to scratch out survival in the illegal economy, much of the violence perpetrated by those they knew and trusted.

More often than not, that perpetrator was an intimate partner or family member. Jasmine was threatened with a blowtorch by an abusive former partner. Leah was threatened with knives by her ex- and, like many other women, repeatedly beaten with objects. Physical torture also included sexual violence, with men using rape as a form of punishment against women who were trying to escape, as Jenny repeatedly tried. Women also frequently spoke of being sexually assaulted by fathers, brothers, cousins and other family relations. Stories often told in voices of individuals who sounded numb to the horrors they were recounting (see Becoming Strong).

I don’t provide these examples for shock value. I tell them because it’s important to acknowledge and understand the size, scope and terrible nature of the levels of violent victimization that occur. This is to recognize that most if not nearly all of the victimization is never reported to any single person outside of one’s small social group – not to healthcare workers, not to social workers, not to shelter staff, and definitely not to the police. As a result, victims rarely receive medical treatment or trauma-informed mental health care and, in far too many instances, cycles of abuse continue, and violent perpetrators are left to offend against others.

The many reasons victims within marginalized communities don’t report crimes are well-known within criminology: victims often lack trust in police and/or any other authority figures; there is a lack of belief that anything can or will be done in response to a criminal complaint; and there is a significant fear of retribution by the perpetrator, his or her family and friends, or even by others within their local community. Recognition of these concerns is the key to increasing police reporting within marginalized communities, as I discovered during field research in Scotland.

Supportive Reporting (also know as “remote reporting” and, in Scotland, as “third-party reporting”) encourages victims to report incidents of crime to police through the use of designated service providers who serve as third parties in the process. Victims in marginalized communities are more likely to report crimes to people they know and trust within the community. Victims can choose what level of participation they wish to have in the process. They can file an anonymous report to be treated by the police as “information only,” meaning they do not wish to be interviewed by police or to have their name put forward in any criminal proceedings.  Should they choose to come forward with their name and contact details, they can ask for a trained community worker to provide additional emotional support during any interviews with police.

How exactly does “supportive reporting” work? Police practitioners identify appropriate community groups to participate, provide training and ongoing support to partners, maintain an active relationship with partners and their clients through informal (coffees and ‘drop-ins’) and formal (giving talks or offering training seminars) means. Those community service agencieswho agree to participate, select 2 or 3 staff members to receive training on filling out the reporting forms and on walking clients through the process. These staff members will:

1. promote the program to their clients,
2. advise complainants on the steps involved,
3. fill out the report for the individual and send it to police
4. provide the level of support required by the individual victims (from taking reports to sitting with the victim, their family and the police during any interviews). 

The first of these programs originated in the LGBTQ+ community in Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 2000s as a way to increase reporting of hate crimes. While earlier evaluations showed, very modest success, similar programs elsewhere have drawn little interest from researchers and thus no further published evaluations. And yet, Police Scotland currently co-runs versions of remote reporting within local Black, Muslim, LGBTQ+, homeless, deaf and other communities in which risk of different forms of victimization can be high. In Canada, the province of British Columbia has set up a protocol to allow for third party reporting of sexual offenses.

These programs are seen by community groups, police and members of marginalized communities, as providing two key benefits: they give victims a voice¹ and provide police with knowledge of crimes that might otherwise go unreported. These are, however, other important potential benefits beyond these. For example, in my own work I have observed that many individuals accessing shelter and other community services are never asked about experiences of violent victimization beyond, in limited instances, intimate partner violence. This means that physical and/or mental trauma remains untreated unless individuals access services on their initiative. Given that many individuals are struggling with daily survival, it is critical that community groups begin to recognize themselves, if not police services, as potential points of access to healthcare and other systems for victims. Supportive reporting reframes the ways in which social workers and community groups see their roles vis-à-vis their clients, hopefully encouraging questions about victimization. These questions need to be asked, as they can lead to working with clients to create steps to stop ongoing violence, prevent future victimization, and help individuals access treatment and other supports.

Here is my modest proposal: using the program guidelines and training materials created by Police Scotland, a police service could create a Supportive Reporting program within a local community. This program could be established as an one to two year trial² with evaluations that consider both outputs³ and outcomes⁴. Very likely there are researchers at a nearby college or university, who would love the opportunity to create research on an emerging topic. The costs for such a program would be negligible for most municipal, regional or state police agencies, and the potential for reducing violence through increased reporting, not something easily dismissed.

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Notes:

1. Research conducted by Marianne Quirouette and myself in 2009 showed that homeless citizens in Scotland, Toronto and Vancouver were largely receptive to the idea of a Homelessness Remote Reporting scheme.
2. I have found in examining a range of different types of initiatives that there is often a lag between launch and when people begin to use a program.
3. Outputs refers to the actions that contribute to the success of a program, such as how many police cases were successfully closed.
4. Outcomes are the tangible benefits a program is intended to deliver, such as increasing victim reporting or reducing certain forms of violence.

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Dr. Laura Huey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, the incoming Editor of Police Practice & Research, Chair of the Working Group on Mental Health and Policing of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the RSC’s Covid 19 Task Force and the former Executive Director of the Canadian Society of Evidence Based Policing. She is also a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada and a Senior Research Fellow with the Police Foundation.