Apply for the Community Trigger/ASB Case Review

The Community Trigger/ ASB Case Review is a process which allows members of the community to ask the Community Safety Partnership to review their responses to complaints of anti-social behaviour.

The Review has been introduced to help ensure that agencies are working together to resolve incidents of anti-social behaviour that are affecting residents quality of life. We will do this by appropriately sharing information between agencies, reviewing the actions that have been taken and use available resources to try and reach a solution and make recommendations that will hopefully prevent the situation from reoccurring.

The Review does not replace the existing complaints procedures of individual organisations, or your opportunity to complain, when appropriate, to the Local Government Ombudsman or Independent Police Complaints Commission.

The Community Trigger/ASB Case Review can be used if you have reported at least three incidents of anti-social behaviour to a relevant organisation within the previous six months. These are incidents where the same behaviour, nuisance or problem has reoccurred and was reported within one month of it happening.

For the purpose of the Community Trigger/ ASB Case Review, an incident of anti-social behaviour is defined as behaviour causing harassment, alarm or distress to a member, or members, of the public. This could include behaviour such as vandalism, public drunkenness, noisy or abusive neighbours.

The Community Trigger/ASB Case Review is not designed to replace existing anti-social behaviour reporting lines or for the reporting of general acts of crime, including hate crimes.

To report an incident of anti-social behaviour please call Kent Police on 101 or Thanet’s Community Safety Unit on 01843 577000 or via email customer.services@thanet.gov.uk

If you or someone you know is being bullied, harassed or abused because of your race, religion, disability, sexuality or gender identity then you can report it via the Independent Hate Crime Reporting line on 0800 138 1624.

Once a Community Trigger/ ASB Case Review application has been received and accepted, the Community Safety Unit will contact the other agencies involved to confirm the details of the reported incidents to verify the threshold has been met. You will be contacted to confirm that the Trigger threshold has been met or if it has not been met what action will be taken to deal with the issues raised.

Following validation of the threshold, the Community Safety Unit will request that agencies provide complete details of the case and any actions that have been taken to resolve the issues reported to them.

Arrangements will be made for a review panel to be formed who will then carry out a case review. The panel will involve senior staff from the appropriate Community Safety Partnership agencies, the Registered Social Landlords and/or other partners that may have been involved. The panel will discuss the anti-social behaviour and the actions taken.

We will write to you soon after the panel meeting to inform you of the findings and recommendations, we aim to do this as quickly as possible within a maximum 25 working days. Should the review take longer than this we will contact you to explain the delay.

The relevant bodies who undertake a case review may make recommendations to other agencies. The legislation places a duty on a person who carries out public functions to have regard for those recommendations. This does not mean that they are obliged to carry out the recommendations, but that they should acknowledge them and may be challenged if they choose not to carry them out without good reason.

We will report the number of Community Trigger/ASB Case Review applications and provide a summary of the key findings to the Kent Community Safety Partnership Executive group and the Office of the Kent Police and Crime Commissioner.

If you are unhappy with the way your community trigger/ASB Case Review application has been handled or the way in which the review panel was conducted then you can request that a secondary review be carried out by an independent panel.

The secondary review is the last step that can be taken in this process, if you are still unhappy you will be directed to the relevant organisation’s standard complaints procedure.