Faith and belief

"I have taken on the role of faith patron because I clearly see the potential of working with faith communities in Sussex. They play an important role in building stronger and safer communities; helping to reduce crime, and support the vulnerable with projects such as street patrols in our town centres. I look forward to leading Sussex Police's engagement with all faith groups, and in working alongside these groups to improve our service to all during these challenging times for policing."

Chief Superintendent Howard Hodges, Equality Patron for Faith Equality work in Sussex Police, who works alongside Equality Champions for the major faith strands: Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh; Christian; Jewish; Muslim. We also have a Multi Faith lead.

Priorities

• Improving our culture of inclusion and increase awareness and understanding of diversity and equality through the delivery of professional development awareness and training. Colleagues will have confidence to share their faith and belief diversity data, particularly for non-visible differences, which will inform our processes and policies. Colleagues will be supported to challenge, overcome and reduce discriminatory behaviours or practices.
• Understanding, engaging and increasing satisfaction and confidence across all communities and victims of crime. Engaging effectively with faith and belief communities to report crime, providing support and awareness to staff and officers who have a responsibility to engage with local people and partners. Working with and belief networks, Chaplaincy networks and multi faith groups to support the policing through development of joint working initiatives in local communities.
• Attract, recruit and retain a diverse workforce. Ensuring robust analysis of workforce data to identify areas of concern or disproportionality to inform organisational priority, delivery of positive action interventions and organisational training and development needs.

Our work in this area

As a public service:

Priority areas in service delivery for faith equality include community engagement, community tensions, and awareness of hate crime reporting. Gaining insight on public experiences is central to developing our approach.

A key part of this work involves engaging with people in our communities and regular consultation with our Multi Faith External Reference Group (ERG).

If you would like to help Sussex police improve its service by becoming a member of the Multi Faith ERG, please email us: [email protected]

As an employer:

For internal consultation, we have an organisational Interfaith Forum to assist with progressing our priorities. This includes identifying any gaps in policy and procedure regarding faith, belief or lack thereof.

If you work for Sussex Police and would like to become a member of the Organisational Interfaith Forum, please email us at: [email protected]