UK Police Forces

Over the past 8 years, Capable People has supported 5 UK Police Forces to achieve the goals for data quality that the Home Office has set them. Forces are required to be able to demonstrate an accuracy level of 90% or over to achieve the Home Office “good” rating for the quality of their crime and incident reporting data. In order to do this, the internal data assurance teams of the Police Forces must follow careful, robust data auditing procedures, otherwise the results they report to Government will be unreliable, and therefore unsuitable for use in strategy development. Obviously the volume of data that is dealt with on a daily basis by a Police Force is very high and often complex, and achieving such a level of accuracy isn’t an easy matter.

That is why the forces of West Midlands, Kent, Essex, South Yorkshire and Lancashire have all invited Capable People to deliver internal quality auditor training on their premises. We have worked with the in house data quality teams to help them develop and refine their processes for data sampling, examination and reporting, and additionally to give confidence to the Home Office that the people that are responsible for assessing the quality of data are competent to do so.

In fact, West Midlands Police (the second largest force in the UK after the Metropolitan Police Force) has been a loyal client of Capable People since 2007. We regularly visit their administrative headquarters in Birmingham to train new auditors or refresh existing ones. These events always mix classroom theory with live data analysis. We use the training event to scrutinise live data, so the gap between classroom theory and live application is closed as we go.