Fewer children arrested by Dorset Police
Children known to the Criminal Justice system are more likely to be drawn into it
Fewer children are being arrested by Dorset Police than 10 years ago.
Child arrests have dropped by 74% since 2010 thanks to a campaign from the Howard League for Penal Reform.
In 2019 under-17s were arrested 594 times, compared with 2,310 times in 2010.
Now the Howard League is encouraging police forces to build on this success and focus on areas where even more could be done to prevent children being arrested unnecessarily – particularly Black children and children from minority ethnic backgrounds, victims of child criminal exploitation, and children living in residential care.
Academic research has shown that each contact a child has with the criminal justice system drags them deeper into it, leading to more crime. This is why the Howard League is working to keep as many boys and girls as possible out of the system in the first place.
Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said:
“Every child deserves the chance to grow and fulfil their potential, and we must do all we can to ensure that they are not held back by a criminal record.
“The Howard League’s programme to reduce child arrests has shown what can be achieved by working together. Police forces have diverted resources to tackling serious crime instead of arresting children unnecessarily, and this means hundreds of thousands of boys and girls can look forward to a brighter future.
“After a successful decade spent embedding good practice across England and Wales, the challenge now is to keep up the momentum and reduce arrests still further. The Howard League will continue to support forces to make communities safer and allow more children to thrive.”
Although 22 police forces, including Dorset Police, recorded increases in child arrests between 2018 and 2019, their numbers were much lower than when the Howard League’s campaign began in 2010.
The charity has encouraged forces to analyse their data and investigate how arrests could be reduced in future.
A significant number of forces reported that the rise was believed to be, at least in part, related to operations to tackle county lines. Instead of being treated as victims, some children are being arrested because they are suspected of having committed crimes as a result of their exploitation by others.
Addressing this problem will be a key challenge for forces over the next few years.
The data reveals continued inequalities for Black children and children from minority ethnic backgrounds. Government figures show that Black children are more than four times as likely as white children to be arrested. The proportion of white children arrested has fallen by 13 per cent over the last 10 years, while the proportion of Black children arrested has doubled to 16 per cent.
The disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on Black children and children from minority ethnic backgrounds increases as they move through it, resulting in huge disparities in the numbers held on remand and serving sentences in child prisons.
The Howard League asked police forces to break down their child arrest figures by age, gender and ethnicity, and the ethnicity breakdown was revealing: data recording was inconsistent and there were huge gaps as a result of failure to record ethnicity for large numbers of children who had been arrested. In 2019, there was no record of ethnicity for more than 5,000 child arrests.