Tav's Police follow-through

A question about PACT meetings reminded Tav about a question he asked about finances and resources used back in 2005. He got a response, well part of a response - a pointer to the information on their website. Being the odd person I am I decided to go through the entire thing.


Page 1, Introduction from the Chair of the Police Authority -

It's good to know that West Mercia Constabulary have been "independently assessed as one of the best performing police forces in the country" so what top 5, top 10, and who did the assessing?

"10% reduction in total crimes recorded" and a "5% increase in the sanction detection rate"

I had to go to Northumbria for a definition

Sanction detection rate - crimes detected by means of a charge, caution or taken into consideration (TIC)

Confusion. If a crime is reported then recorded and a charge made, does that appear as one item or two. Do reported crimes count at all or does sanction detection rate only apply to crimes picked up by the police directly? If SDR is applied to all recorded cases then that means crime is down and resolution is up - good. If it doesn't that they're picking more people up on their own, but reported crime is down, which could be bad depending on why it's not being reported.

West Mercia is the highest performing force, in its family of most similar forces, for sanction detection rates of the above types of crimes.

That's nice how many are in this family? (Looking elsewhere the answer is 8)

This represents an investment of £2.9 million in extra staff at no additional cost to council taxpayers.

Wow get me one of those money trees. No direct additional cost to council taxpayers would have been better, the money has to come from somewhere after all.


Page 2, What we have achieved -

Oo some stats from the PPAF Victims of Crime Survey, no link to the PDF about the contents of the survey so I've done that for you. This is the 2007/2008 version. Do I sound surprised when I mention that it's well written and quite precise? Again here's the link they don't provide which is a more raw version. WARNING this link has frozen both Opera and Firefox, opening directly from Word requests a password, when asked click cancel and load a read-only copy.

Both the DOC and the PDF provide some insights into how these things are undertaken.

Wow 90.1% of respondents were satisfied with their first contact with the police and 71.5% were completely satisfied... hold on that's 161.6%. Have they counted the "completely"'s in with the 'plain' satisfied? Sort of, looking at the PDF you're asked if you're satisfied or dissatisfied with the service and then asked a follow-up question. So that's 71.5% of the 90.1% or 64.4% of the total with presumably the other 25.7% split between "very" and "fairly". So to be more precise and assuming the 2007/08 guidelines were in place.

Satisfaction of victims of domestic burglary, violent crime, vehicle crime and road traffic collisions with respect to:	Dissatisfied	Very or fairly satisfied	Completely satisfied
A. making contact with the police;	9.9%	25.7%	64.4%
B. action taken by the police;	22.2%	31.5%	46.3%
C. being kept informed of progress;	38.2%	33.7%	28.1%
D. their treatment by staff; and	12.3%	23.7%	64.0%
E. the overall service provided.	21.4%	31.7%	46.9%

Still good results, but a little more um honest. The 38.2% dissatisfied for C. now stands out quite plainly. Except looking at the DOC where they're split into groups we get something that looks different. Take A. making contact with the police for the five types we get 82.9%, 76.1%, 59.1%, 85.3%, and 74.8%. Assuming those are the 'satisifed' averaging those we get 72.1%, which is a far cry from the 90.1% listed in the report. The results are close to the percentage of "satisfied" respondents who were "completey satisfied" though. Looking at the PDF guidelines they're changing how this will be reported in future, ironically a little closer to how I've done it.

Being located between the West Midlands conurbations and Wales, West Mercia’s roads are very popular with motorcyclists.

Okay, no need to explain further.


Page 3, Financial Report 2005/06 -

one police staff to 1.5 police officers.

Or two police staff of every three police officers as you can't have half an officer (well at least I hope not)

The resources available for the year amounted to £172.8 million. This was a 4.2% increase on the previous year and required a 4.0% increase in the Council Tax.

Tcch can't they get that from the same money tree they got the £2.9m from?

Okay £172.8m budget with costs of £188.0m and an income of £21.7m leaves £28.5m in reserves... oops sorry that's £6.5m presumably £22m was already there. Hold on £172.8m is 4.2% up on last year, so last years budget was around £165.8m or about £7m difference. So the budget was increased by roughly the same amount being stashed away in the reserves. Hmm now that's a coincidence.


Page 4, Independent Custody Visits -

Nope all clear 575 of 730 of the offered (79%) accepted.


Page 5, Ethnic Monitoring Data -

Oo we get several links to extra data at last - yeek 43 pages, 13 pages and a 404 not found.

Okay those'll take some time to go through, lot's of tables I'll need to look at this separately at some later date.


Page 6, Performance 2005/06 -

Ah the conglomeration of all the badly presented data, plus some extra bits and bobs.

First off "Satisfied" and "Completely Satisfied" get new overall headers of "Our Target" and "Our Result" respectively. Huh? So you were after a target of 90.1% satisfied and you got 71.5% completely satisfied instead. That tells us what exactly? Nothing it's nonsense. A satisfied target of say 87.9% (the national average) with a result of 90.1% is good and makes sense. This table doesn't.

Oo "E"

Proportion of police recruits from minority ethnic groups compared to the proportion of people from minority ethnic groups in the economically active population.

National Average - 5.0% Recruits with 8.0% population, West Mercia - 1.8% with um don't know how many.

The percentage of police officer time spent on frontline duties.
National average - 62.3%, West Mercia - 65.94%. Wow who knew half an officer could do so much especially when number of hours sick is 81.9 compared to 70.9 for officers and 79.8 to 72.6 for staff. They're sicker and still get out more - well done.

Next table and a bit more coherent, well sort of.

Domestic burglaries per 1,000 households. (Our original target for 2004/05 as published in our 2000/01 plan was 10.7)**

So why the change? Check the "**" reference, well you could if there was one.

Apparently we are also missing national averages for several types of crime. Odd I'm surprised domestic burglary is lacking stats, perhaps they're still being compiled and will be added in later.

And a final laugh (cos it's either that or cry)

Number of people killed or seriously injured in road traffic collisions.

Our target - 800, result - 692; you're obviously not aiming well enough.