Video clips - Police & Crime Panel - September 2025

Representing Stroud District Council on the Gloucestershire Police & Crime Panel also intersects with my volunteer work with Stroud Against Racism.

The Constabulary along with the Community Legitimacy Panel hosted Community Engagement Forum up in Gloucester recently. I thought that this was an ideal platform to tell the story of a recent racially motivated attack in Stroud. The story demonstrates the lack of trust in policing by sections of the community.

The Community Engagement Forum is an important event for the community but was missed off the list of meetings by the Police and Crime Commissionaire at the Police & Crime Panel on the 5th September.

As the panel was discussing performance monitoring and the community forum event was not on the meetings list I wanted to know if the issue of measuring performance on the basis of how the police are treating people from different backgrounds to a certain standard was brought to the PCCs attention. The issue was powerfully and clearly raised by the outgoing chair of the Community Legitimacy Panel at the forum.

I suppose this is the coalface of local politics, that was a bit of a curve ball question for the PCC. However, these are precisely the concerns I come across in my community and I have been elected to represent those views. Here's the reply.

I think that it's appropriate to finish these clips with the views of the outgoing chair of the Community Legitimacy Panel offering an explanation as to why he thinks sections of the community often don't report race hate crime (responding to my story, above).

The full video of the Community Engagement Forum is here:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gi2I0GAH4