Business intelligence to help police to standardise data

Gloucestershire Constabulary is using business intelligence (BI) software to help meet the national deadline for providing standardised police data.

Under the nationwide Cross Regional Information Sharing Project (Crisp) all 43 forces in England and Wales must be able to allow other forces access to their data by March 2006.

Crisp is part of the Impact programme, which was initiated in response to the Bichard Inquiry into the Soham murders in 2004. Bichard called for the creation of systems for sharing intelligence data as a ‘national priority’.

The BI software from supplier SAS is helping employees to search records and generate error reports, says Reg Barnard, Gloucestershire Constabulary’s information services development manager.

‘Based on those reports, we are working on our child protection database, going through it to effectively review the data, then amend and enhance it,’ he said.

‘By adding in information such as the date of birth of people who we did know about but were not keeping records of, we are making the database better than it was before.’

The technology forms part of Gloucestershire’s effort to be one of the most operationally effective forces in the UK by reducing crime and the fear of crime.

Barnard says that the force needs to look more closely at the information that it is collecting, rather than treating it as a back-office chore.

‘Instead of having a large pile of data that we never looked at, we want to look at it as an asset, and use it to try to gain value for the organisation,’ he said.

‘Like most companies, we grew up with old-fashioned paper filing systems and then moved to computerised systems, but we didn’t manage the information in either effectively.

‘We needed to improve the quality of the asset and add value to it in terms of delivering it to the front-line,’ said Barnard.