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Start a community trigger

Start a community trigger

What a community trigger is, how to start one and what happens next.

If you’ve reported anti-social behaviour (ASB) but feel that no action has been taken you can start a community trigger.

This is also known as an ASB case review.

This means the case will be reviewed by the agencies involved, such as, us, the police, health teams and social housing providers.

You can start a community trigger if you’ve reported three separate instances of the same problem over the last six months.

Each incident of anti-social behaviour must have been reported within one month of it happening.

Case reviews will not start if these conditions are not met.

Start a community trigger

To start a community trigger you can:

You’ll need to tell us the:

  • dates you made each of your complaints
  • person or organisation that registered your complaint or any incident reference number
  • details of the ASB incidents

If you contact the police, they’ll tell us about your community trigger.

If you contact us, we’ll also notify the police about your community trigger request.

What happens next

After you’ve started the community trigger, we’ll:

  • assign one of our ASB officers to your case
  • send you a letter of acknowledgment within 10 days
  • gather information from partner agencies such as the police, fire services or social landlords
  • review information with partner agencies and actions they’ve already taken
  • decide on next steps

We’ll keep in touch with you to let you know what’s happening with your case. We can give you details of advocacy services  for support or you can contact Lighthouse Victim Care.

The ASB officer will then either:

  • confirm that your request is valid, tell partner agencies and decide on next steps within  20 working days
  • decide the request is not valid and tell you about your right to appeal

The whole process takes up to 35 working days. 

You only need to start a community trigger once. We keep a log of all community trigger cases.

Right to appeal

You have the right to appeal the decision made about your community trigger case.

To do so you can contact us by following the Community Trigger steps above or:

  • calling 101
  • completing the online complaints form on avonandsomerset.police.uk
  • asking to speak to the Duty Inspector at your local police station

Make a complaint about the service you received

Use our corporate complaints process if you’re not happy with the service you received.

Community trigger data

The Community Safety Partnership is required to publish data about Community Triggers.

  Community Triggers Received Threshold Not Met Number of Case Reviews Held Number of Case Reviews with Recommendations
2021 35 10 17 17
April 1 1 2 2
May 7 1    
June 3 3 4 4
July 6 2 2 2
August 5 1 1 1
September 1   2 2
October 7 2 1 1
November 2      
December 3   5 5
2022 18 2 7 7
January 5   1 1
February 3   1 1
March 5 2 1 1
April 1   1 1
May 2   2 2
June 2   1 1
Grand total 48 12 24 24

What the terms mean

Community Triggers received: the number of applications that are made to the community trigger.

Threshold not met: the number of applications that did not meet the “locally agreed threshold”, which is 3 or more reports about a single issue in the last 6 months.

Case review held: the number of applications that met the threshold and were subsequently reviewed. As all applications that meet the threshold are reviewed, this is also the number that met the threshold.

Number of case reviews with recommendations: the number of reviews that gave rise to an action plan.