City of London Open Spaces improve anti-social behaviour
reporting with help from Civica.
Reporting and monitoring to improve service and accountability for Hampstead Heath police teams
The City of London’s Open Spaces departments is to set up a dedicated crime and anti-social behaviour monitoring system for Hampstead Heath and its adjacent green spaces, using the Authority anti-social behaviour recording and reporting solution from Civica, one of the UK’s leading providers of consulting, software and managed services for the public sector.
The new ASB solution, due to be implemented this summer, will help the Hampstead Heath constabulary to more effectively record and monitor approximately 1,500 anti-social behaviour, theft and envirocrime incidents that occur in the area each year. The City of London manages over 10,000 acres of heavily used open spaces and leisure areas across London ranging from Epping Forest to the 150 different gardens in the Square Mile. Hampstead Heath alone is estimated to receive 10 million visits each year.
Civica’s Authority Public Protection solution uses extensive reporting to help the Heath Constabulary team harness its expert local knowledge, and show greater accountability in its regular dealings with the different parties that shape the park’s management policy. These include Hampstead Heath’s statutory management and consultative committee, the London Borough of Camden’s Community Safety Teams, the Metropolitan Police, and local societies and residents’ associations.
The teams will add incident reports to the system from computers at neighbourhood offices. The system can incorporate geographic information system (GIS) mapping capabilities to see easily where incidents are occurring. It accommodates a range of communication technologies and is fully scalable so that constables can make on the spot reports from devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) in the future.
City of London chose Civica because of the flexible and robust nature of the software and its success in more than 75 local authority ASB departments. The software is already used by the London Borough of Newham’s parks police service and in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.
Richard Gentry, Constabulary and Support Manager for the City of London, said: “Our constables deal with incidents ranging from lost children and damaged fences to theft and indecency, so we wanted to improve the accuracy of our reporting and reduce the time spent doing it.
“Civica’s Anti-Social Behaviour analytical capabilities will enable us to identify where hotspots of particular incidents are occurring. We will be able to join forces with our partner agencies to quickly deal with them. Another important benefit is that the system will also enable us to show greater accountability in what we do. In particular, the system will be able to provide management groups with more accurate key information on our operations and the resources and support we need than ever before. As an example, as new management plans are developed for the Heath, we will have the potential to agree performance indicators for the management and policing based on recorded data and workloads.”
Tony Hughes, managing director of Civica Public Protection, said: “Open spaces like Hampstead Heath are a vital asset for London’s residents, so responsive community enforcement is an important front line service. It is vital for policing and management organisations to be able to gain an overview of anti-social behaviour and then deliver effective responses in combination with local policy networks. We look forward to helping the City of London’s constabulary team to meet local enforcement needs more effectively in the future.”
The Civica group supplies 32 of London’s 33 Boroughs.