The Youth Voices team reached out to speak with Kathryn Holloway, Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner as part of the initiative to hold 100 conversations with Bedfordshire's Afro-Caribbean community, following the Black Lives Matter protests of last year.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests last year, Kathryn set up an initiative called 100 conversations where she invited members of Bedfordshire's Black Afro Caribbean community to discuss their experience and thoughts on discrimination, and as the voice of younger people is often unheard Youth Voices contributed to these discussions and then invited Kathryn to be interviewed on the Youth Voices Connect podcast.
The role of the Police and Crime Commissioner is to be the public's voice when it comes to policing Bedfordshire, setting our priorities for the Chief Constable and Force to deliver in a strategic plan and holding the Chief Constable to account and we wanted to find out more about the role of The Police and Crime Commissioner how The PCC is responsible for directing the spending of a £100M budget supporting the Victims of Crime and increasing security through the distribution of community grants to partner agencies through the Community Safety and Victim Support funds, which included funding of the Youth Voices OutReach project.
Listen to our discussion with Kathryn, and how she has implemented some of our suggestions to help improve how Bedfordshire police its young people.
100 HOURS to enhance confidence and trust in Bedfordshire Police - Listening to our Black communities report:
"As Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, I made a commitment to reach out to the county’s Black communities in my Police and Crime Plan of May 2016.
While I have made many contacts - and built friendships as well as professional alliances - within such communities since coming into my role, the death of George Floyd made me realise that I had not succeeded in giving a voice as widely as possible to those who are not already established partners of Bedfordshire Police in respect of their experiences and attitudes towards policing.
I wanted to hear directly, in person, from as wide a sample of our Black residents as possible to learn their own suggestions of ways in which we could enhance their relationship with policing in Bedfordshire and, potentially help to do so across the police service more generally in England and Wales. This is the reason that I committed, as a key priority of my term - and time - during 2020-21, to devoting 100 Hours to produce this report in collaboration with the widest possible cross-section of Bedfordshire’s Black and Mixed Race residents.
These conversations, with individuals aged from 15 to 80, took place with me between July 2020 and the end of January 2021."
https://www.bedfordshire.pcc.police.uk/fluidcms/files/files/PUBLIC---The-100-Hours-Report---FINAL.pdf
In next week's episode, we speak with Festus Akinbusoye the candidate for the May 2021 Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner election.
#yourvoicematters #thetownturnover #makebedfordbetter #100conversations
