South Wales Police Drives Crime Down, Clearance Rates Up

Staffing consumes 80-90%-plus of total police budgets; however, police executives often cannot get a true picture of their staff’s activities and performance. Most executives want more control over their biggest resource — people.

SOUTH WALES POLICE AND NICHE

South Wales Police (SWP) executives found a way to steer their force toward this organizational goal by making smart use of NicheRMS and the information it contains, achieving some remarkable results, including:

• Sustained ability to drive crime down while improving clearance rates.
• Public satisfaction improvements that presently lead the country.
• Improved national performance rankings, from one of the worst UK forces to one of the best.

KEY NICHE CAPABILITIES

Niche supports and automatically logs policing activities in a single system in a single database. The result is transparency of work from the frontline up to mid-managers and chief executives. Knowing precisely who is doing what, when and how empowers the chief executives to direct resources for optimal force performance.

Furthermore, when executives make decisions on deployments, NicheRMS helps them continually measure and monitor how their decisions are working, as well as ensure the service is on track to meeting goals/objectives. If they are not on track, it helps them make adjustments.

In South Wales, one of the areas targeted for improvement was public perception, specifically with the force’s delivery of victim services. Going into this project, SWP had no idea how much Niche was going to help them in this area.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• Executives embrace the use of information as “the lifeblood of any organization” and they have infused this attitude into the culture of the force, including in promotional evaluations.
• Everyone from the Chief down is intimate with the details surrounding how information is put to use in their organization — including direct use of Niche RMS.
• The force has control over its people at all levels — including aggregated statistics at the total force level, command
  levels, and even down to individual officers on individual shifts. Because all officers in all job roles use NicheRMS and the application logs their work via tasks, under-performers cannot mess with numbers regardless of where they work (even in forensic identification or court services because all functions are built in to Niche).
• Data entry has gone from occurrence entry backlog, prior to Niche, to real-time now. This is a common theme with Niche customers.
• Other customer comments you will hear across the board:

“It gives us that level of intrusion and support that we haven’t had previously.”

“It’s made our life far more transparent, and it’s made us far more efficient in the way that we do business. We’re turning in detection rates, for example, that we would never have dreamed of four or five years ago.”

“SWP used Niche RMS to drive crime down by 20%, even for crime types that rose in other parts of the country. We would not be able to achieve that without the power of Niche, and that means we’ve got thousands less victims than otherwise we would have in South Wales. And that is a very powerful reason for having Niche.”

CONCLUSION

In summary, because South Wales Police astutely refined their operational processes, and did so with awareness of Niche’s single application/single database concept, they are now in an enviable position, in which:

• Frontline officers and detectives have the tools they need to record, manage and solve occurrences efficiently and professionally.
• Mid-level managers have real–time information at their fingertips about what all their people are doing, and how they are doing it.
• Senior executives have information summarized at all levels of the organization, helping them steer the organization toward better performance and away from non-essential activities.