Send in the street pastors

Martin Surl, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, has been buying flipflops. Hundreds of them. Not for the police, but for a local Christian volunteer team of ‘street pastors’. Earlier this year, Surl announced a £40,000 grant to cover the group’s training and resources. ‘Some things are better delivered by people who aren’t the police,’ he says.

What street pastors deliver is hard to sum up in a few words. When I first encountered them a couple of years ago in their uniform of baseball caps and blue jackets, both with ‘STREET PASTOR’ printed across them, I thought they were going to ask me whether I was saved. But street pastors are not street preachers. They are, instead, a friendly presence — ‘non-judgmental’ is a word they often use — who offer help to anyone who needs it. They do ‘everything you can think of’, says Surl. ‘If you have a young girl there who’s drunk too much, they will look after her.’ That, by the way, is what the flipflops are for: high heels, Surl observes, ‘aren’t very effective when you’ve had a few beers or the equivalent’.

Street pastors hand out bottled water, accompany drunk people to the right bus or a safe taxi, minister to the homeless, clear up broken glass, give a listening ear to the miserable, and are on hand to defuse tension. The results of these accumulated tiny gestures are remarkable. Since 2003, when the initiative was founded (they are now active in over 280 UK locations), street pastors have been repeatedly credited with reducing crime. In 2012, Salisbury Inspector Andy Noble remarked: ‘Violent offences are 12 to 15 per cent lower than this time last year and I would attribute much of that to what the street pastors are doing.’ In Kingston, after violent crime around the town centre almost halved between 2005 and 2009, Superintendent Paul McGregor praised the street pastors’ ‘tremendous work’ as a key factor.