Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

On the Record

This thematic Inspection is one of a series of HMIC inspections designed to assist and support the Police Service, and their partners in the community, in achieving a long term, sustainable reduction in crime and disorder.

Nationally the Service commits substantial resources to collecting and processing vast amounts of data to better inform decisions on how best to achieve this result. The quality of that data is crucial to the decision making process. Sophisticated information technology systems are now available to the Police Service to assist in a rigorous and systematic analysis of this data – that analysis is also dependent on good quality inputs.

This Inspection examined in detail two fundamental components of the Service's data gathering systems, namely:

• Crime Recording (Part I) and

• PNC and Phoenix – the National Intelligence System (Part II).

Getting a copy

A Thematic Inspection Report on Police Crime Recording, the Police National Computer and Phoenix Intelligence System Data Quality (PDF format) is available from the Home Office website.  It is broken into sections due to the length of the report:

Section 1 includes the executive summary and introduction to crime recording
Section 2 includes Home Office guidance, force processes and force recording rates
Section 3 includes the police approach to crime recording 
Section 4 includes the introduction to Phoenix and the 1998 PRG recommendations
Section 5 includes Marketing, strategy and training, and Phoenix data quality
Section 6 includes the way forward, summary of recommendations and appendices 

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