We have been working with police forces on their demand and workload for several years now and, with our partners at Justice Episteme, have developed a method we think has huge potential to help the service. We’ve called it Poliscope - short for Police Strategic Capability and Operations Performance Evaluation, and are now delivering this in partnership with Bedfordshire and Nottinghamshire. You can learn more about the Poliscope partnership, its methods and benefits here.
Along the way we have also created a national Poliscope version which takes data from police.uk and makes forecasts of crime trends into the future. It will also enable each police force to investigate their own crime forecasts. We're looking to road test this model in the coming weeks before finalising the first version and rolling it out to police forces and other organisations.
In the meantime, we thought we would share some high level crime forecasts we have made already which are set out in the slides below.
In summary, Poliscope found that:
sexual offences and violent crimes recorded by police are expected to increase by a fifth over the next two years compared to pre-pandemic levels
drugs offences and public order offences are also forecast to increase, whilst burglary and robbery could decrease
violent and sexual offences have been making up an increasing proportion of total crime (this will have had a disproportionate impact on police workloads as the nature of these crimes means that they are more time-consuming to investigate)
As with all forecasts, these are our best estimates within an interval of uncertainty, of what might happen to crime as we come out of the Covid-19 pandemic. But we have tested our method by conducting forecasts using historical data and comparing them to what actually happened, and are pleased with the results.
We plan to periodically update this national crime forecast when new data becomes available.
If you work for a police force and are interested in road testing the national Poliscope tool or would like more information about our method and results email hello@poliscope.org.uk . We’d love to hear from you.
Crest’s Poliscope lead is Ellie Covell, Head of Strategy (Performance) at Crest, a former police officer who previously worked at the Cabinet Office.
Justice Episteme’s Poliscope lead is Dr Savas Hadjipavlou, a former senior civil servant at the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health.
