Working with government and law-enforcement authorities on community security issues
A speech delivered by Mark Gardner, Director of Communications, Community Security Trust (UK), at the founding conference of the European Forum on Antisemitism, on March 13th, 2008, in Berlin
Thank you for inviting me to address this important gathering.
I have been asked to explain the work of Britain’s Community Security Trust, which I will refer to as CST, and also to explain our work with police and government.
CST tries to work in partnership with every part of our Jewish community, regardless of religious, political or geographical divides. We regard security and antisemitism as something which can affect any Jew, and we want to empower every part of our diverse community to lead the life that it chooses. We still have occasional difficulties with some of the more orthodox elements of the community, but its generally agreed that we have the broadest range of communal contacts of any Jewish group in Britain today.
Working across our entire community, is a critical first step in our understanding what is happening, in legitimising our organisation and our work, and in then presenting our narrative to our community and to the rest of British society.
Jewish communal self defence has a proud historical record in Britain, and obviously we did not suffer the devastation of the Holocaust. There have been two traditions from the 1930s onwards: on the one hand, fighting the fascists on the streets, which often involved fighting the police as well, and, on the other hand, the respectable, political efforts of the Jewish establishment.
By the 1980s, these traditions had increasingly merged, and CST achieved charitable status in 1994, with the support of the then Home Secretary and also the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, as an organisation dedicated to helping the Jewish community and the police to fight racist crime and terrorism. Since then, our external focus, beyond the Jewish community has been about intensifying our relationship with police and policy makers.
We use our annual fundraising dinner as a rallying point at which over 1,000 people of our community come together, and we invite lots of regional police chiefs and specialist officers; and also members of parliament and senior civil servants to join us. This enables us to show these partners the strength of our bond with the community; the focus of our concerns; and crucially for them that we regard our problems as issues that face British society as a whole. We stress our sincere commitment to British values of democracy, liberty and human rights and this provides the framework for the main speech of the evening, which is given by a senior politician. This year’s speaker was David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, but in previous years we have invited Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, as well as Home Secretaries, and Defence Ministers.
Obviously, this kind of public endorsement for our work and for our objectives is very important indeed.
CST’s most public day to day work is the provision of security to our community. We do that free of charge, and we have approximately 3,000 volunteer personnel around the country. So, we’re providing a strong, visible deterrent for our enemies; a visible reassurance and empowerment for our own community; and a security network that ensures we get community intelligence about antisemitic race hate incidents, about extremist activity and about suspicious activities around our community that may warn us of terrorist reconnaissance activities.
We believe it is obvious that the community’s security depends upon partnership between ourselves and the police. CST represents communal concerns to the police, government and media, and provides access for these parties into the Jewish community as they require.
We have three offices and over 50 paid staff, split between those who manage the security, and also research work, political and media engagement, as well as fundraising. The threat is obviously long term, especially in Britain, where we have so many home-grown supporters of Al Qaeda and the global Jihad, and so CST is involved in the planning stages of all high profile new communal buildings, and we have nearly completed a multi million pound project of installing shatter proof glazing on windows at schools, synagogues, and elsewhere. At the moment we are actually Britain’s biggest single customer for this technology.
It is crucial that we present our concerns in a rational and focussed manner, so that we are treated with respect and not dismissed as paranoid Jews. Publications such as this, our annual analysis of antisemitic incidents is acknowledged by police and government as being more accurate than the police’s own figures, and it is this kind of rigorous approach that has led police and politicians to use the CST as the model for other minority communities to follow. For instance, immediately after the 7th July 2005 London tube bombings, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police addressed Friday prayers in London’s largest mosque and told his audience that they had to create a CST.
Since 1999, politicians have told the police that they must work in partnership with all the diverse minorities in Britain. Most of the police agree with this approach and there are formal consultation processes between the police and public representative groups at a national, regional and local level. CST feeds into these processes wherever there are Jewish communities, and we are also called upon to join groups that work with police in dealing with high profile incidents. Other activities with the police include:
- joint patrols on Shabbat and the main Jewish holidays
- co-ordinated operations at Jewish events throughout the year
- in Manchester we make a joint publication with them that is sent free to over 3,500 orthodox households there
- regular participation in desktop emergency planning exercises at police headquarters
- written contributions to the drafts of policing policy papers
- we arrange educational tours of Jewish communities
- we produced a guide to Judaism for police officers, which they love. They distributed over 10,000 copies of it and were then contacted by police forces in America, South Africa and Australia to supply them with copies too.
Perhaps the most successful initiative has been to accompany our closest police partners on educational day visits to Auschwitz Birkenau. We have now taken 100 officers of all ranks, and found that this creates a very close personal bond with them, and makes them think very seriously about why and how they do their job. As a result we have also produced a police officer’s guide to the Holocaust and again it has been very well received.
Our advisory partnership with police is something that we try to repeat with government, civil servants and other policy makers. So, they also join the educational trips, around our communities, and, also, the Auschwitz visits.
Internationally, my colleague Mike Whine will be known to some of you for his work with the EU, the OSCE, and various other multinational acronyms.
In Britain, we are part of numerous advisory groups with the judiciary, the prosecution service, and the Home Office, and give written and verbal contributions to policy papers and inquiries.
The most vital work began with the inquiry by 14 Parliamentarians into contemporary antisemitism, which produced an analysis of what the problems are, and more importantly, what must be done to solve them. The analysis offers has 35 recommendations that provide a holistic template for tackling antisemitism at every level, including government, police, judiciary, and on campus. This was not an official inquiry, but the government issued a command response to it, which meant that it achieved the status of an official report.
This provides detailed government responses to each of the 35 recommendations, and in practically every case commits government departments to ensuring that it is implemented.
So now, along with some other communal groups, CST is involved in various committee processes with government departments, civil servants, police, university authorities and others to actually deliver the actions that are promised.
One immediate result has been an unprecedented promise from government to help pay for school security, and we are now urgently negotiating this process with the local authorities who are supposed to deliver it.
Thank you.
