Ethnic tension early warning call

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A leading thinker on community tensions is calling for a national "early warning" network to prevent race-related and other disturbances.

Professor Ted Cantle said growing diversity meant community cohesion was a major problem for parts of the UK.

Speaking as the government unveiled new anti-terrorism proposals, Prof Cantle said the police alone could not be expected to deal with tensions.

He said "tension monitoring" units could predict and prevent violence.

Professor Cantle wrote a key report into the 2001 northern riots which warned of different communities living "parallel lives" with little contact. He now heads the Institute of Community Cohesion at Coventry University, which has developed thinking on tensions in modern Britain.

The former local government chief said an early warning system to monitor these tensions could be key to predicting and averting disturbances.

At present police attempt to gather information for a national rolling analysis of problems.

But research funded by Whitehall and the Metropolitan Police concluded that local monitoring networks working at street level could pool intelligence to avert crises.

Tension monitoring teams would include a broad range of local experts, from youth workers to the police, and would regularly meet to assess the local temperature.

We have got to get to the people who are most affected before they become disaffected - tension monitoring is not a one-off exercise - you need to build up an understanding of how the different communities work or don't work together Ted Cantle

Prof Cantle said disturbances such as the 2005 Lozells riot in Birmingham may have been foreseen if local agencies had been better placed to understand rising tensions between the black and Asian communities.

"Those communities were at loggerheads for some time. There was a particularly trigger [for the riot] but the question is could we have anticipated the events?

"Much of this tension monitoring is left to the police to do. We are trying to suggest that early intervention is much more about community intervention.

"We are managing the interface between many different communities," he said.

"It is not just about diversity. Society is changing rapidly. The population churn is quicker. People are moving around and it's not uncommon to find that 50% of the children change in some schools in one year."

Asked whether some local leaders had "turned a blind eye" to problems within minorities or between different ethnicities in some cities, Prof Cantle said: "There has been a fear of making things worse. Confidence is part of the process and that is what we hope our toolkit will do.

In contrast, he praised local authorities who had gone on the front foot to tackle difficult local issues, such as a rise in tensions among young Asian men in East London over counter-terrorism raids in the past year.

"We have got to get to the people who are most affected before they become disaffected," he said.

"Tension monitoring is not a one-off exercise - you need to build up an understanding of how the different communities work or don't work together in a particular area.

"It is extremely difficult to deal with tensions - it is much easier to deal with if you have the networks there and people who know each other."