The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) announced today that they have stopped another gang of drugs smugglers. The five gang members were caught after 80kg of cocaine (with a street value of £25m) was found in Dover in 2009. SOCA officers replaced the cocaine with flour allowing them to arrest the men when they came to collect it. It is believed that 30 similar deliveries had already been received by the gang, with an estimated total street value of £500 million.
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Archive for the ‘UK Police’ Category
Will buying the same system deliver those cost savings?
Monday, August 16th, 2010There is an interesting outcome of the current financial crisis hitting the police service and that is the area of IT standardisation. I have had many recent discussions where individuals feel that ‘buying the same systems’ enables collaboration and reduces costs. This approach risks the Service wandering blindly in to the procurement of inefficient systems just to meet the tick in the box and goes nowhere in sharing information on a collaborative basis.
On commencing the national Intelligence Database project in Scotland in 2001, the largest and most immediate piece of work which had to be conducted was to look at the myriad of intelligence handling processes which were going on within individual forces and working together to rationalise these in to a single and agreed model for intelligence management. The National Rules and Conventions were the outcome and yet the true work was to simplify and make as efficient as possible the process of intelligence management. This in itself without the IT system to back it up was a major step forward in reducing costs in processing.
The result of this process was to allow the procurement of one central system for intelligence, rather than all eight forces buying the same system. It was from this that the Service managed to save millions of pounds over the future years.
What seems to be missing from the current approach is the review of process. Buying five of the same within a region may save some cost savings through bulk buying, but one thing you can guarantee is that the current approach will lead to the same system being used in five different ways.
Regions need to wake up and start to review their processes on a collaborative basis as the first step along the road, prior to any discussion about buying the same system.
Confidential Informant falls back into bad habits
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010No matter how helpful a confidential informant is, some of them will always return to bad habits. Duluth News Tribune reports today that drug informant Paul Kastern has been jailed for five years for selling methamphetamine. Since the 1980s, Kastern has helped police convict other drugs offenders in return for having his own sentences reduced. He even helped to convict his own attorney of snorting cocaine and smoking marijuana. However, in February 2009, Kastern was caught out when another confidential informant purchased meth from him on three separate occasions.
The rising cost of informants
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010The Metropolitan Police paid Covert Human Intelligence Sources £1.9m in 2009/10, a small rise from the the £1.86m figure that was paid out in the previous year. The Independent also reported that a further £176k was spent on travel, accommodation and meals for police informant handlers.
Should the police be paying such sums of money to the crimals? Or does it reflect a truly cost-effective method of gathering and acting upon intelligence? The moral dilemma of paying informants to provide information on other criminals is always going to be present but if the alternative is to spend many more hundreds of thousands of pounds on undercover surveillance, then it must remain a crucial tool for modern-day policing.
Number of protected witnesses trebles in Scotland
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Scotland’s Sunday Mail reported yesterday that the Scottish Witness Protection Unit protected 44 witnesses in 2009/10 – over three times the number witnesses protected in the previous year. This seems to highlight the growing importance of protecting vulnerable witnesses in the fight against organised crime gangs. The Sunday Mail article emphasises the shady nature of witness protection but accepts that the nature of the job requires the SWPU to work in the shadows. Despite this, the UK has some of the most professionally organised and legislated witness protection programmes in the world, serving to allow more witnesses to come forward to support the fight against serious organised crime.
Councils Use of Surveillance Powers
Friday, July 30th, 2010It was reported today that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) has been used over 400 times in the past two years by councils across the Black Country. RIPA was introduced to regulate investigations by public bodies (including covert surveillance, the use of Covert Human Intelligence Sources, interception of communications and the use of communications data); it is used by councils to investigate offences such as rogue trading, benefit cheating and flytipping. ABM’s software for managing covert operations and investigations is fully compliant with RIPA legislation. The full article can be read here.
“Better value for money in policing will be a challenge…”
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010“…but it is possible” – the words of Sir Dennis O’Connor as two reports on value for money in UK policing were published yesterday. HMIC’s report, Valuing the Police, found that only 11 percent of total police personnel are visible and available to the public at any one time and highlighted a need to improve shift patterns to more accurately match demand. It finds that too much time is increasingly spent on investigation and specialist functions while the number of police officers working in the community has fallen over the last four years.
A seperate report by the Audit Commission, HMIC and the Wales Audit Office, entitled “Sustaining value for money in the police service“, found that, crime has fallen by 45 percent since 1995, but this has been coupled with significant increases in police spending which has, according to the report, been poorly scrutinised and challenged.
The report shows that 80% of police spending is on the workforce which suggests that, if real cost and efficiency savings are to be made, police forces need to think carefully about the deployment of personnel resources, reducing unnecessary management and over-skilled back-office workers. The report goes on to challenge the police service to make savings of up to £1 billion (12% of current expenditure). £420m of this is accounted for through savings in procurement, back office, reducing overtime, workforce modernisation and reducing management overheads. But the report suggests that an additional £500m can be saved through productivity improvements - i.e. reducing the number of police officers or making them work harder… Whether such savings are truly achievable remains to be seen.
The Shape of Policing
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010The Chief Inspector of Constabulary this morning has published a report detailing what everyone else has been thinking these past weeks. The fact of the matter is that anything over a 12% cut in police funding cannot be achieved without re-engineering the way in which UK police is organised and functions. The reality is that over the last 10 years we have created a police service which has been dogged by bureaucracy, red tape and, at times, a risk averse approach. All of this, as in any organisation that suffers the same level of hand tying, results in increased costs and increased inefficiency.
Sir Dennis O’Connor is therefore right that we should now look at the whole picture in terms of UK policing structure and service and go back to basics in terms of delivering core services. One solution to the problem may well be an acceleration of merging territorial based policing within regions and moving more specialised services to the centre. Do I dare to say a return of the Regional Crime Squad in disguise..? At least under this model, the public get their territorial and local based service whilst major crime investigation and other specialised services are concentrated where it counts. The biggest hurdle to cross now is that of investment. The merger process and setting up of central service incurs significant investment against long term savings. The question is will there be political commitment to spend now and save later? The plot thickens and it may well not come to any conclusion until after the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in October where the real devastation by cuts may eventually be revealed.
Crime at lowest level for 29 years: but for how long?
Thursday, July 15th, 2010The latest British Crime Survey reveals that crime in England and Wales is at its lowest levels since 1981; but how long can this downward trend in crime last with talk of ‘budget cuts threatening 60,000 police jobs’? According to former Gloucestershire Chief Constable Tim Brain this is the number of police officer, civillian staff and community support officer posts that could be axed by 2015. Reducing bureaucracy and police collaboration/ regionalisation may allow more to be done with less to a certain extent but surely no-one can expect current levels of front-line policing to be maintained if this worst case scenario is realised.
Should Police be cut?
Thursday, July 8th, 2010A recent local government survey conducted across the public in the region, delivered some interesting results. As the Government has stated that the NHS and Overseas aid will be ring fenced in terms of funding and police, immigration, education etc. will be cut, the public have other opinions. The survey clearly published the public’s desire to see the NHS and Overseas aid cut and Police and Security ring fenced.
In some ways the public are the more intelligent reviewers of what is important to maintain social stability in times of austerity than the government and there are obvious concerns that crime will significantly increase and public order may become a problem. We have seen over the last week what is involved in tracking down a single dangerous individual in Northumbria and the man power and costs associated with this single incident will run in to the millions of pounds. Can the Government therefore justify a 25% cut in the budget of policing or should there be a review of the priorities and what is actually important in terms of maintaining public confidence through what we will be a torturous time in the UK ahead?
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