Community safety partnership scorecards

The aim of community safety partnership (CSP) scorecards is to enable front line supervisors to deliver on performance objectives by:

• delivering positive outcomes for victims
• increasing the use of out of custody disposals
• delivering effective supervision of crime and performance
• interrogating and understanding how their team or department is performing
• identifying individuals’ performance and providing them a space to illustrate their plan to improve performance

It also aims to improve sustained performance through measuring with the pre-determined performance metrics of:

• workload supervision
• victim update compliance performance
• statutory time limit expiries
• the number of individuals on released under investigation (RUI) and the use of bail
• appropriate overtime spend
• stop and search supervision

The intended outcomes for CSP scorecard are:

• A sustained increase in the number of out of custody disposals. This would continue until such a point the organisation can confidently say there is appropriate use and application of out of custody disposals. This can best be tested in 6 month or annual dip samples.
• 100% victim update compliance levels.
• Intel submissions – there should be an illustratable increase in intel submissions comparable by individual, team or department and CSP. This will generate a number of what an acceptable workload for any particular team is, creating a target.
• Overtime spend –there should be a reduction in the amount of overtime by officers. Outlier teams identified should support to ensure adequate staffing means a reduction in overtime. The annual budget dictates the amount of savings required and ensuring good governance around overtime spend is where this saving is sensibly made. 
• The organisational goal to rely less on released under investigation (RUI) increasing the out of custody disposal and where required bail is seen in the number of people on bail.
• Response times – an improvement of response times to agreed service level agreement (SLA) of 12 minutes for immediate and 1 hour for prompts is maintained. Any teams shown as outliers in failing this are supported to compliance to the SLA.
• Reduce the number of Association of Chief Police Officers Criminal Records Office (ACRO).

CSP scorecards intend to have an overall reduction of poor performance outliers for the following metrics:

• stop and search supervision – a reduction in the number of stops forms awaiting a sergeants review or updates from officers
• statutory time limit (STL) crime failures – a reduction in the number of crimes which pass the statutory time limit and can no longer be prosecuted
• improving trust and confidence in victims who may feel let down if the investigation was not conducted expeditiously or early evidence not captured and subsequently lost
• undisposed investigation and demand levels – a reduction of outliers of single individuals or teams holding higher than normal crime workloads

Initial consultation

Initial consultation was held with superintendents and chief inspectors of CSP scorecards to identify and agree measurable performance metrics that align with organisational priorities. These are fluid metrics which are added and removed as performance moves into acceptable parameters.

The CSP scorecards aim for all STLs to be complied with and the implementation of early development or action plans for individuals who regularly have crimes falling out of STL. This can be a plan set with an individual with specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives to ensure sustained improved performance in this area.

Data

Work was conducted by criminal investigation and strategic hub data engineers to create a single Power BI hub. This incorporates all agreed metrics with the same format and same interrogatable features for the whole local policing command (LPC). This must be located in one depository.

The agreed format was that all data must be live as old data impacts users’ faith in its reliability. Previous systems had data that was refreshed every month or every 2 weeks. Therefore, users could not see the live performance data.

Data being held on different systems also meant different methods of navigating data with no consistency. This made it hard to understand and interpret performance data particularly for new in-service supervisors. Consistency in use and data representation was also important.

The CSP scorecards platform was created to easily report back to Chief officers without the need of extensive interrogation via a centralised department. There were no financial costs involved and a number of iterations were created before the final version was agreed and launched.

This was rolled out to all front-line inspectors and sergeants. It required LPC chief superintendent sign off and required no funding. Force analysts in the strategic hub provided the skills and work to create the dashboard. They worked with in force data engineers to get access to systems.

An evaluation is planned and will be led by the police force. It will look at the impact of the intervention and measures are compared before and after implementation. The planned evaluation will also examine:

• how CSP is implemented
• how and why it does or doesn’t work
• for whom it works and doesn’t work
• how much it costs or saves

Review

This was rolled out in October 2023 and a review will take place in October 2024. This review will compare performance data from October 2023 in all the metrics and compare them with performance data in 2024. It will also review qualitative reviews and plans set in the review app to see if the supervisor’s development plans had a direct impact on performance.

A data snapshot of performance was taken in October 2023 and this will be compared to data in 2024.

Initial impact of the intervention shows that supervisors of varying ranks can manage both demand and performance of officers in real time.

The initiative informs chief officers of potential future risks, therefore alleviating any critical resourcing incidents that have previously been identified at key times of the year. Supervisors can see where an officer is struggling, through measures such as an unusually high workload.

Early intervention allows a better outcome for victims of crime as well as development opportunity for the officers. The intervention allows for early prevention work to be undertaken so that the demand does not indirectly affect the remainder of the team and result in negative outcomes for the public.

Feedback

The feedback from line managers is that it allows them to have a wider understanding and grip on teams on a real time basis that was not available before. This has allowed for concerns to be dealt with at a local level, without the need for escalation to senior management. This has lead to a reduction in formal disciplinary measures.

This now forms part of regular 121s with inspectors and subsequently sergeants. This will also be featuring in personal development reviews (PDR) and 'my conversation' performance.

Some of the learning between the data engineers and strategic hub was gained in the consultation phase. The hub wanted to provide complex visuals and statistics which the operational stakeholders were against, as front-line supervisors did not have the time or capacity to interpret these.

It was decided that all graphics must be interrogatable down to the individual officer and that would all be in simple bar graphs.

Live data

Another barrier was getting access to live data. The data was held on different servers and systems such as Athena, SharePoint and the finance database. The data engineers had to conduct significant work with information communication technology (ICT) to be able to get the data out of different servers and systems into one consistent dashboard style.

This was an issue as asking front line supervisors to access different systems would make it impractical and influence buy in.

One further barrier was the lack of clarity on HR systems on which resources/teams and officers were posted. The backlog in HR postings was providing inaccurate data on dashboards.

Inaccurate data would render the dashboard unreliable and impact buy in. Therefore, significant work was undertaken to ensure that team structures on the dashboard matched Athena, and matched what the users understood of their team’s structure.