Superintendent Suzanne Hopper
Preventing and reducing offending by children is an important focus for policing. The Metropolitan Police Strategic Insight Unit (SIU) “Children in Custody Sprint” (2019), identified that a significant proportion of children arrested were not offered any support by police at the time of their first arrest (due to not being convicted or otherwise accused) and then went on to re-offend. The SIU recommended considering what options there were to offer support with the aim of preventing future offending. From this the idea of Guardian was born.
Guardian is a light touch video and information-based intervention that was aimed at the appropriate adults (AAs) of child arrestees. This approach was designed to capitalise on the initial contact in custody to improve both the AAs’ opinion of the police and also prevent reoffending. Guardian was implemented as a randomised control trial (RCT). Suzanne will present the results of a one year follow up that examined reoffending and what impact the intervention had on the AA custody experience.