Recommendations on Policing in Multi-Ethnic Societies IV. ENGAGING WITH ETHNIC COMMUNITIES 12. Police should be tasked with developing methods and practices to communicate and co-operate with minorities and to build confidence together at local, regional and national levels. 13. Police will need to ensure they have the capability to communicate with minorities in minority languages, wherever possible by recruitment and training of multilingual staff, and also by use of qualified interpreters. 14. Police should play a proactive role in providing encouragement and support to minorities to assist them to communicate and co-operate with the police, for example by acting as partners in initiatives to promote recruitment and to provide training on minority issues. Minorities for their part should be ready to communicate and co-operate with the police for the purpose of increasing community safety and access to justice. 15. It is recommended that mechanisms are established to ensure that police are democratically accountable for their actions to people from all sections of the community. These need to include effective systems for making and following up complaints, which are accessible to persons belonging to national minorities. All sections of the community need to be aware of their rights and responsibilities in relation to the police, and of the powers of the police and the services they are expected to provide. V. OPERATIONAL PRACTICES 16. Measures should be taken to ensure that police enforce the law in an impartial and non-discriminatory manner which does not single out any particular group, e.g. by engaging in 'racial profiling'. Such measures should include codes for the conduct of operational practices, such as use of police powers to stop and search people on the street and in other public places. 17. Police should take steps to encourage the reporting by persons belonging to national minorities of crime, in order to promote community safety and access to justice. 7