Policing

In 2009, a mother killed herself and her daughter after being subjected to ten years of anti-social behaviour. Now the police  are saying that they are putting in place a system which will help identify the vulnerable quicker.The news is here. A senior policeman was on Radio 4 earlier today and it was obvious that he was enacting a script because he could not state what was new or different in this system or give any details about the system. I wonder if there is a system. Anyway, I will carry on with my analysis.

It seems that the often, reports of crime which should get linked are treated as separate incidents. Linking of incidents seems like such a basic thing to do but it seems that it is not routinely done. I don't know what sort of new system has been put in place but I will say what sort of system should be in place. Hopefully all crime reports are logged into a national database. The minimum details such a database will hold are the details of the crime, details of the victim, time and date of crime, how was it reported (999 or the local police number) and, incident number. All an analyst has to do is to search for addresses for which more than a certain number of incidents has been reported within a given period of time. This is really easy. A lot more complicated things can be done but let us stick with this one simple thing for now. I am sure there is not a very high  proportion of UK households which a victims of repeated crime. They will get flagged up very quickly.

This sort of thing does not need a lot of money. A team of less than 5 can handle entire England quite easily. Crime is being recorded under the current system anyway. If the right information is being recorded in the right format then this is really easy to set up. Now the question is, why has this not been done yet? I really do not know. May be nobody has thought of it yet.