The Intercultural Cities programme has produced a Manual on Intercultural Community Policing to support local police to effectively serve their increasingly diverse communities so to ensure full access to human rights for everyone. The Manual provides local police, including high-rank police managers, public safety directors, managers, and decision makers, with guidance to implement policing principles to design new procedures, protocols, structures and specialised units in their local police services. It aims to respond to the question of how a police chief, director or politician in charge of the security of an intercultural city should design its model of urban security management; it also helps to effectively address the challenges that diversity might pose to the achievement of peaceful coexistence. As a matter of fact, while a positive management of diversity can make societies more dynamic, prosperous, and creative, the lack of it can feed racism and xenophobia, hate speech against migrants and minorities and islamophobia, as we are witnessing today the spreading across Europe of political rhetoric based on the defense of fixed national identity defined by ethnicity and traditions.

The Manual promotes a transition from a policing model based on surveillance, to a policing strategy that puts the citizens at the heart of its action and engage them in defining community-based and public space safety solution. By doing this, the new approach links the concepts of security, safety and care, promotes citizens’ participation and targets police services that have a vocation to innovate and improve the quality of life of all citizens.