Gloucestershire police failing to record one in five crimes

The crime data integrity report, released today after an inspection by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, found 7,900 unrecorded reports a year.

Of these, 4,200 were reports of violent crime, including rape and domestic violence. In total 81.6 per cent of all crimes were recorded.

HM Inspector of Constabulary Wendy Williams said: “The force has demonstrated strong performance in other areas of policing, but must make immediate improvements at almost every stage of the crime recording process, otherwise victims will continue to be let down.

“Even when it has enough information from which to record a crime following an initial call, there are unnecessary and unacceptable delays. Call handlers obtain the information they need from victims in an empathetic manner and document it on the incident log.

“But the force doesn’t make enough use of it within subsequent crime-recording decisions. Too often this means it doesn’t record reported crimes at all. And on occasion this can lead to victims disengaging.

“We hope that this report will act as a catalyst for improvement in how the force records crime.”

The report said: “Many of the unrecorded crimes were of a serious nature. The potentially harmful situations that some victims were left in without safeguarding from the police are unacceptable.

“These failings were compounded by a lack of supervision of crime recording decisions both within the force control room and at a local level. The lack of such supervisory intervention, and the subsequent lack of accountability for crime recording standards, significantly contribute to the force’s poor crime recording accuracy.

“We have serious concerns about the lack of understanding of the full extent of domestic abuse crime, the under-recording of these crimes and the absence of satisfactory services that should be provided to victims. Domestic abuse often involves victims who are particularly vulnerable to further offences being committed against them.

“The lack of senior level leadership and governance of crime recording arrangements has resulted in a lack of focus on improving crime recording.”

In total, 87 out of 117 audited rape reports were accurately recorded, the report said, branding it a “cause of concern”.

Of the 30 unrecorded rape reports, six were incorrectly classified as other crimes, 13 had not been recorded at all, and the remaining were incorrectly given a certain classification.

The constabulary said it accepts they should have been recorded but added “many of them could not be investigated as they were anonymous reports from victims who did not want to be identified to police.

A spokesman said: “They contained little or no detail of the incident – often no times, no circumstances and no location.

“The Sexual Assault Referral Centre will have provided care and support in many of these cases and tried to encourage victims to speak to us in the future.

“Where the Constabulary does have information it will now ensure a proportionate investigation takes place.”

The report concluded: “Gloucestershire Constabulary’s crime recording arrangements are inadequate.

“It must now work hard to make the necessary improvements so that victims of crime can be confident their reports will be taken seriously, recorded and investigated."

Responding to the report, chief constable Rod Hansen said: “We would like to reassure people that we have reviewed all the incidents raised in the report and can say that this is predominately a recording failure not a service failure. That means in many of the cases identified, a good level of service was given to a victim, even though we didn’t create a crime report for it.

“It’s also important to explain that when you make contact with Gloucestershire Constabulary we always record what you tell us, we assess every call and deploy when you need us.

“Where we have let ourselves down is that we have not always complied with national recording standards by making a separate crime record where appropriate.

“This is not the same as letting down a victim or failing to safeguard them."

“The national rules around which incidents must be recorded as crimes run to over 100 pages and equipping a busy workforce to be compliant in every aspect is challenging.

“In 2014, I had four members of staff helping to ensure crime recording was at a high standard and due to austerity and a need to bolster the frontline we had to reduce that to one person – part-time, trying to audit the whole force.

“However I take responsibility for the Constabulary`s need to improve in this area. I have commissioned a review to find out how we got into this position and what we can learn from that.