Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

The following is a report of the presentation given by Stan Dubeck, Grants & Community Safety Manager, London Borough of Southwark, at the inaugural Information Sharing Network Conference, 10 September 2001.

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Mr Dubeck said he would set out how things were done in Southwark, how they had got there and perhaps provide some commentary on some of their concerns. This might help others reflect on their own situation and provide some learning points. He did not claim that in Southwark they had all the answers, and he was not an expert in the field. He had no specific skills in relation to information management.

Sharing and using information between organisations which had clearly defined common objectives around reducing crime, would seem to be a fairly straightforward affair. But barriers got in the way to make this in fact a very complex and at times difficult thing to achieve. Some of these barriers were technical, some about organisational culture, some about a lack of expertise and skills and others about cost. To break through these barriers it was important to have a clear view about what was to be achieved through sharing information, and some drive and motivation within the partnership towards achieving it. Nowadays the motivation should be supplied by government imperatives to develop crime and disorder strategies that were soundly based on evidence.

He thought, however, that a champion or champions was needed to develop the information sharing functions effectively.

It was important to recognise the full extent of information collection, sharing and management that needed to take place in order to support effective crime reduction strategies. It went beyond mapping crime data, other datasets and the sharing of personal information relating to individuals.

In Southwark, as in many other areas:

• they produced and shared information based on agency datasets relevant to crime and disorder (including reported crime and allegations of crime)

• they shared personal data (through Youth Offending Teams and other multi-agency functions)

• CCTV systems run by the local authority provided personal information shared with the police

• they commissioned public perception surveys around crime, disorder and the fear of crime and undertook research, sharing the findings

• they produced a variety of information on activities aimed at reducing crime

Crime Mapping

Along with many other metropolitan authorities, Southwark had troubled relations with the police in the early eighties. Any contact with the police had to have the formal sanction of a council committee. At that time, there was hardly a free or productive exchange of information. By the early nineties this situation had been turned around and there was an active partnership anxious to adopt collaborative working. They commissioned their first audit of crime in 1995. For that they produced limited crime hotspot information by laboriously copying data from acetate sheets produced by the Met marked with co-ordinates identifying individual crimes onto borough maps – very much a one off exercise which gave a snapshot of crime at a moment in time. This could not be sustained and only really provided limited information, but nevertheless showed the value of capturing the available data and helped to develop some understanding of trends and patterns of crime, which was essential if they were to properly target resources on areas of greatest need.

To map crime more effectively, they used the Omnidata package developed by Infoshare. The council bought 4 licences: one for each police division within the borough and one for itself. But there was only limited support within both the council and the police for the development of a joint information sharing and mapping project. Reasons for this included:

• a general lack of understanding of what the system could offer

• a lack of conviction of the need for quality information to underpin action

• a lack of technical understanding/expertise

• concern about how the new system would interface with existing police systems

Certain people persisted with the project. The system worked as follows.

At the police end, information was downloaded from the Met’s Crime Reporting Information System which recorded allegations of crime. It was initially cleansed and sanitised, then depersonalised and encrypted for security purposes. At the council end, the information was then validated – addresses were corrected and data geo-coded. It was then mapped using mapping software. At the heart of the system was a property gazetteer which continually improved in accuracy as address error logs were corrected.

The scheme took some 12 months to develop before it could provide useful information. Much of this time related to processing error logs on three years’ worth of crime data. With the increasing accuracy of the property gazetteer, data cleaning was no longer a burden and only took an hour or two for a month’s data. The initial investments, not only the financial outlay, nevertheless needed consideration. Maintenance of the system also took up resources. Just on the council side there was one GIS mapping post dedicated to the project and occasional additional clerical support for data cleansing. A good quality PC and a printer capable of dealing with high quality output were needed, relevant software and a budget to support training needs. GIS mapping was a skill in increasing demand, so there could be a relatively high staff turnover.

All crime hotspot

Figure 8 showed all alleged crime in the borough over last year. The hotspots identified high crime localities, by and large town centres and transport interchanges. The south of the borough had a number of large open spaces and high quality housing. Even such a general map could provide some less obvious findings, for example a hotspot around a shopping centre car park in the north east of the borough. Shopping centre managers confirmed high levels of theft from cars that had led them eventually to install CCTV and undertake additional security patrols.

CCTV

A CCTV system covered Camberwell town centre; an outline could be drawn on the streetscape to show the area directly covered by the cameras, ie within panning range, and a secondary buffer zone drawn covering areas just outside the view of the cameras. Crime allegations could be mapped. All of this data could be represented in table format: figure 1 showed the data for the buffer zone, identifying the crime types and comparing levels over a five year period. All the variables could be adjusted, and this was one of the principal tools used in evaluating the CCTV system. Patterns of crime within both zones before and after the introduction of the scheme could be examined and conclusions drawn about its impact in reducing overall levels of crime and in displacing crime out of the core area into the buffer zone.

Burglary reduction programme

The Government domestic burglary reduction programme identified some very specific criteria to be met in order to win funding; to focus on areas of around 11 – 15,000 households with domestic burglary rates of over twice the national average. Southwark could identify areas which met the criteria very easily. One of the areas worked in respected few boundaries to which they would normally work such as local authority housing neighbourhoods or police sectors. Census enumeration districts were mapped to give household and population numbers, showing varying levels of household density. Having identified an area which broadly fitted their number of households’ criteria, they could then simply overlay domestic burglary data for the previous 12 months and establish if that criteria was met. Adjustments had to be made to accommodate local police and housing department boundaries to simplify management arrangements. They then organised property surveys, detailed analysis of crime data and undertook consultation. The basic tasks to identify the first two areas for which they successfully applied for funding took little more than a couple of hours.

Local area data

Mapping greatly facilitated detailed analysis of crime patterns in local areas. Southwark was trialing a model of local governance aimed at increasing local community involvement in the borough’s democratic processes. The borough was divided into 6 areas. In each, crime had been identified as a key local community concern. They had sought to develop a dialogue about the community perceptions of crime. Information on main crime trends was provided. Hotspotting meant this could be done in a way which showed clearly which parts of the area were most subject to particular crimes, and that could be tested out against local people’s perceptions. They could also hotspot patterns of offending and victimisation. One interesting and inescapable feature of the hotspot map of the home location of young offenders in four of the areas was a link to the four children’s homes in the borough, enabling some fairly pertinent questions to be put to the Director of Social Services about the supervision regime in the homes. Perhaps less obvious and even more interesting were the hotspot maps drawn up of the home address of young victims of crime. It did not show where the alleged crimes were committed. The obvious question arising was why should the home address be an indicator of a risk of becoming a victim of crime? This had not been looked at closely enough yet.

Endless types of analyses could be undertaken. The police had an initiative aimed at identifying links between the various burglaries committed by individual offenders. Scene of crime officers recorded the imprints of trainer or shoe markings at burglaries, which were matched to a particular type of shoe or trainer. The imprints and their category (type of shoe) were then mapped and a series of imprints evidently made by the same individual could be clearly identified.

Ambulance data

Ambulance service data was now being mapped (figure 2). Call outs to incidents of violent assaults showed clear hotspots around the Old Kent Road and the Walworth Road – both of which had numerous late night licensing establishments - another very clear hotspot in the centre of Peckham. This had to be set against other information and examined more clearly to draw conclusions which could lead to specific action. Although it was fairly easy to map data and reveal patterns, it was quite a different thing to have the resources and expertise to analyse the patterns, cross-reference them with other data and draw out conclusions which led to action. A good example of this was the time it took for the link between increased levels of street crime and the theft of mobile phones to be identified.

Other analyses

Numerous other analyses could be made. There were overlays for housing estates, regeneration areas, police beats and more recently, priority neighbourhoods, drawn up in line with the National Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy requirements.

Youth investigations

One particular use of the mapping facility was having a profound impact on the way youth crime was addressed in Southwark. As in a lot of metropolitan areas, Southwark had benefited from some good reductions in overall crime rates but this had been offset by worrying increases in youth crime and violent crime. They started investigating this and discovered in one residential area that significant fear of crime was being expressed by young people. The area was chosen in the first place because a number of offenders who had recently come to the attention of the police lived there. The fears of the young people were mainly around violence, bullying and intimidation meted out by some of their peers. These victims were reluctant to name perpetrators for fear of retribution. Crime data and maps were examined but relatively low levels of actual crime were found in the area. Further work revealed significant levels of violent crime around the adjoining shopping centre. It became clear that the perpetrators were avoiding assaulting their victims within the residential area for fear of being identified within the local community and they chose the relative anonymity of the shopping centre to pursue their victims.

Although these perpetrators had recently come to the attention of the police they did not have recorded histories of involvement in crime, whereas detailed enquiries subsequently undertaken did reveal serious and significant histories of assault, coercion and violence which largely went unreported because of the way they operated. They had come to the attention of other agencies: education welfare, social services and sometimes the youth offending team, but none of the individual agencies had recognised the full extent and seriousness of their offending behaviour, not having had the benefit of the information held by other agencies on these individuals. It was only when information held by all the agencies was pooled and shared that the full involvement of these youths in crime, and the fact that they were in effect living as outlaws totally out of adult control and supervision, became clear.

Other findings had also emerged about the progression of some young people into careers of offending. These careers often started before they were 10 years old with a history of being victimised by older youths. The victims themselves then progressed into offending, particularly against their peers from the age of about 10 to 14 and then beyond that very often a progression to serious acts of violence against older people.

Southwark’s developing strategy had three strands:

1. A Risk Management Panel to deal with those identified as persistent offenders. The panel was multi-agency. It had dedicated support and the principal objective of collating all information held by the differing agencies on individuals referred to it and addressing the concerns presented on a case conference basis.

2. An approach towards those young people identified as at risk of becoming offenders and diverting them.

3. A general approach aimed at reinforcing protective factors in all young people.

Each strand had a series of customised interventions.

A number of other multi-agency forums had arrangements for sharing personal data, including the Youth Offending Team and an Anti-Social Behaviour Unit. There were arrangements for the sharing of personal data between the housing department, social services department, the probation service, a local NHS trust and the police. All of this activity was governed by an information sharing protocol.

The first protocol governed the exchange and use of depersonalised information. This was a simple document which recognised anxieties within the partnership about the potential for misuse, and differing and perhaps misleading interpretations of crime data. It also recognised a growing public demand for information on local patterns of crime. The protocol defined the purposes depersonalised information could be used for; it identified the types of data from differing agencies that could be used and made provision for a number of other factors such as secure storage of data. It sought to deal with the potential for conflict arising from interpretation of data. Much of this was subsequently incorporated into a broader protocol promoted by the Met and the ALG which dealt in some detail with the sharing of personal data. They subscribed to this London-wide standard which included proformas for requests and identified officers in each of the agencies who were designated for the purposes of sharing information within the partnership.

The protocol was essential for the proper management of information, for compliance with data protection and for representing the objectives in sharing information of the subscribing agencies. It nevertheless did represent a significant bureaucratic hurdle which one could argue impeded to an extent a critical activity in support of crime reduction.

Some multi-agency training had brought officers from the agencies of the partnership together to encourage cross-agency working and to encourage the creation of cross-agency networks at the local level. About 300 officers were involved from the housing department, the police, probation service and a range of other functions. The exercise met its basic objectives and was well received by the participants. But two demands emerged very clearly. The first was for guidance on how to make information sharing easier to manage.

Confusions had emerged over what information could and could not be exchanged – there were data protection and human rights issues raised. There was a lack of understanding of the need to supply adequate information with a request for personal data in order to allow the recipient of the request to decide whether of not they could properly respond. There were issues about time delays.

The protocol and arrangements on sharing information had proved to represent sound practice but they had ignored the need to promote and explain the arrangements properly to the people on the ground for whom they were designed. A pretty basic omission.

All the practice and regulation and advice on information sharing was being drawn into an easy to use practitioner’s guide, using professional help. The result would be a manual which incorporated the protocol, which would encourage the proper sharing of data in line with Section 115 of the Crime and Disorder Act. It would include the relevant proformas and it would explain the process simply and understandably.

An important function was to inform the crime and disorder partnership on changing patterns and trends in crime. A data package (figure 3) on a quarterly basis coincided with meetings of the partnership. A table identified overall performance in reducing crime in the borough, using recorded crime information supplied by the Met’s Performance Information Bureau (figure 4). It provided an indication of how Southwark was faring against other boroughs in their crime reduction partnership family. It was one of the best indicators since it more or less ruled out factors influencing crime trends at regional levels and therefore created an even playing field. A performance which went up or down indicated that some local factors must be at play. For Southwark the indicators had generally been favourable, having slipped down the table from first to fifth over a period of five years.

The same source of information was used in relation to main crime trends and performance (figure 5). For trends, they generally compared the most recent quarter’s performance against data for at least a 12 month period or for a similar period in a previous year. This tended to take into account the regular cycles of crime increases and decreases which tied in with the seasons, the weather and other events such as school holidays. They also identified performance against the overall targets in their crime and disorder strategy (figure 6) and against individual crime types. The data package then included relevant hotspot maps to illustrate any changing trends.

Some work was undertaken around young people’s attitudes towards crime and the criminal justice system some time after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in order to understand better their views and experiences around racism, authority and life in the borough. One of the objectives was to learn how to win over their confidence in the statutory agencies and the crime reduction agenda. They learnt a lot of very positive things particularly about their sense of attachment to their own neighbourhoods and communities. They were also inevitably presented with some quite difficult messages about their cynicism towards figures of authority. The virulence of their views had to be acknowledged and addressed but they also had to be managed quite carefully. Difficult questions arose about how criticism could be dealt with within partnerships and how different agencies should relate to each other in order to maintain constructive and positive relationships.

There was a need to provide information in a regular and consistent way about the activities of a partnership, not only externally to the public but also internally for the benefit of the partnership itself. It was particularly important to do this at the public level when there were difficulties with reported levels of fear of crime rising despite overall reductions in crime. Some partnerships were particularly good at this; he did not think Southwark was.

Most partnerships would be surprised at the extent of the activity around crime and disorder that they were supporting. It was very easy to be active in one part of a partnership and not be aware of things happening elsewhere which were of direct relevance. An understanding about this level of activity could act as a significant boost to the confidence of a partnership. Southwark had a directory of over 300 different projects and initiatives ranging from a small environmental improvement scheme or a project delivering a service such as neighbour mediation, to major activities such as a Single Regeneration Budget funded programme to tackle hate crime or the youth offender team function. The directory acted as a signpost for referral or simply for more information. It also tried to identify the contribution to the crime and disorder strategy in terms of outcomes. Produced in hard copy and in CD ROM format, the directory was widely used inside and outside the partnership. The CD ROM format had search functions to facilitate particular enquiries, geographical or thematic, or levels of financial investment. It was a tool with the potential for a lot of further development.

Good information systems could deliver some very practical benefits to partnerships in less obvious ways. Figure 7 gave a summary of external funding secured for crime and disorder initiatives. The high crime rates of a metropolitan borough such as Southwark made it high on the Government’s priority list for support; but still the case for support had to be made, evidence had to be marshalled. Doing that efficiently was largely due to the fact that the information systems in place could deliver the evidence to demonstrate clearly to internal and external partners the case for investment in reducing crime and disorder.

The development of local neighbourhood renewal strategies involved the need for information on a whole range of social and economic factors. Some of the systems developed from a crime point of view could serve these new needs well. In future the community safety agenda could well be absorbed within the wider neighbourhood renewal approach. This would inevitably help create better connections with agencies that in the past had been difficult to engage. The whole agenda could become more joined up from a planning and delivery point of view. This closer collaboration would help the sharing and development of common information systems with a potential for influencing change to a much greater extent than now.

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Date modified: 19 June 2003
Review date: February 2004
Originator: Home Office Information Sharing Te