ABSTRACT
This chapter is written from the perspective of the authors, two criminal justice practitioners who had the opportunity of using their professional experience to help shape the creation and early development of these arrangements. The fact that we were secondees from the police service and the probation service into the Public Protection Unit (PPU) of the National Probation Directorate (NPD) allowed us to experience directly the creative tension that can develop from inter-disciplinary work as well as to model the critical relationship that now exists between the police and probation in the arena of public protection. Our experiences, many of them undertaken jointly, of writing the Initial Guidance, co-ordinating the production of the first year’s annual Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) reports, facilitating successive years of regional seminars and contributing substantially to the publication of The MAPPA Guidance in March 2003, have given us an invaluable insight into the work already achieved across the 42 areas of England and Wales. In particular, it has given us an appreciation of the potential for further development as well as the challenges of reaching that potential.
