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Tuesday, 09 February 2010 17:20 |
| | Sir Norman Bettison (pictured), the Association of Chief Police Officers' representative for policy on tackling violent extremism, told Peter Taylor, in his programme ‘Generation Jihad’ that the Muslim community ‘could do more’ to help police forces tackle the threats posed by violent extremism and radicalization.
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Sir Norman said in the programme, broadcast on BBC 2 last night:
"I'm looking for the community to work much more closely with the police in identifying young people that they have concerns about in terms of the people that they're mixing with, the sort of websites that they're going on to and the material that they're reading." "Now, that information can only come from the community itself."
"I think we have to be alert and conscious of the risk that's ever-present and prepared to interdict and prepared to share information.
"So the community as a whole could do more and the Muslim community is a part of that."
The need for communities to work together and the integral part of the Muslim community in our counter-terrorism strategy is a matter that has been long understood since the publication of the report by Demos ‘Bringing it Home', which champions the community-led approach to preventing terrorism.
The community-led approach is also underlined in the critique of the government’s Prevent strategy by the New Local Government Association, ‘Stronger Together’.
Sir Norman’s comments on the need for Muslim communities around the country to work ‘much more closely with the police in identifying young people that they have concerns about in terms of the people that they're mixing with, the sort of websites that they're going on to and the material that they're reading’ will surely invite questions from the Muslim communities themselves given the recent story of a West Midlands police force monitoring Muslim toddlers in nurseries, as well as the story in the Evening Standard last week reporting that school teachers in Waltham Forest were being trained to spot terrorism recruits among schoolchildren aged 11.
The matter is not aided by the grave mistakes and miscarriages of justice we’ve witnessed in recent months. The deportation of the Pakistani students who were falsely accused of concocting the ‘Easter bomb’ plot and today, news that Mohammed Atif Siddique has been released on appeal after an appeal judge ruled that he had suffered a “miscarriage of justice”.
While the community-led approach properly acknowledges the significant contributions Muslims can and do make to preventing terrorism, these recent disclosures, and the palpable concerns they raise among Muslims, is food for thought for police forces that look to Muslims to ‘do more’.
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