Kent PEEL 2015

Kent Police is good at preventing crime and anti-social behaviour and keeping people safe. HMIC’s crime inspection in 2014 also found the force to be good at reducing crime and preventing offending.

The force priorities reflect clear commitments to supporting victims, working with partners, keeping people safe from crime and anti-social behaviour and ensuring that visible, community policing is at the heart of policing in Kent. The importance of preventing crime and anti-social behaviour and keeping people safe is generally well understood throughout the whole force. Well-trained staff work within the community support teams and provide an effective service to the public.

The force works closely with partner agencies and communities and uses a wide range of tactics to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour, and has won awards for its work. Senior community safety partners speak positively about working together with the force and of the information sharing arrangements at strategic and operational levels.

While there are some areas for improvement, including how the force captures, evaluates, understands, and shares good practice, the public can feel confident that the force is working well to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour, and keep people safe.

Kent Police’s approach to investigating crime and managing offenders is good. This is consistent with HMIC’s crime inspection in 2014, when the force was also judged as good at investigating crime.

The force responds well to reports of crime and attending officers understand their role as the initial investigator and the need to undertake primary crime prevention work. Crime allocation is effective with some few exceptions. The quality of investigations is good, investigation plans are thorough and well documented, following approved practice for investigations, and there is clear evidence of effective support and review by experienced supervisors.

Victims are generally kept well informed as investigations progress, assisted by the force’s priority of ‘putting victims and witnesses at the heart of everything they do’ which includes compliance with the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime.

The forensic science service is effective for both volume and major crime, but there are some backlogs in forensic submissions.

The force identifies vulnerable offenders and makes efforts to divert them from further offending. While there are a few areas for improvement, the force’s processes for working with partner organisations to identify, monitor and work with repeat and dangerous offenders to stop them re-offending work well.

Kent Police is committed to protecting from harm those people who are vulnerable. It has established processes to identify repeat and vulnerable victims. The protecting vulnerable people board is an essential element in the force’s plans to improve services, drawing together all the main strands of work into one meeting.

HMIC found that the force’s initial response to support vulnerable victims of domestic abuse and anti-social behaviour, as well as missing children, is good. However, frontline constables and police staff’s knowledge of child sexual exploitation is limited. This needs to improve.

Kent Police has the lowest charge rate in England and Wales for domestic abuse offences. The force needs to continue to monitor and assess this area to ensure that it fully understands the reasons and to ensure the outcomes of these cases are appropriate.

The central referral unit provides multi-agency support to vulnerable people and ensures that immediate steps are taken to ensure that victims are safe.

Kent Police has invested in tackling domestic abuse, missing persons and child sexual exploitation and continues to try to provide improvements to its services, including working with academic institutions. Frontline officers are given tasks to target high risk offenders. This demonstrates that protecting vulnerable people has become the focus of everyday policing activity.

Kent Police is good at identifying and tackling serious and organised crime. This is the first year HMIC has graded forces on their effectiveness at tackling serious and organised crime, including a force’s arrangements for ensuring that it can fulfil its national policing responsibilities, so no year-on-year comparison is possible.

The force has a well-developed understanding of the threat posed by serious and organised crime, and is developing an effective multi-agency response to it, including work to prevent people from becoming involved.

Kent Police and Essex Police tackle high level serious and organised crime in collaboration, through the joint serious crime directorate (SCD). The SCD is good at assessing the threat posed by serious and organised crime and provides well-managed investigations and disruptions of high-level organised crime groups (OCGs) using a range of tactics.

At a local policing level the force is conducting a range of operations with partners to disrupt OCGs, but more could be done to ensure the understanding of serious and organised crime among frontline officers.

The force communicates well with the public about serious and organised crime. Information is published on the website, social media sites, and within the local press.

The force has robust arrangements and chief officer oversight to provide its national policing responsibilities, and good arrangements to test its response are in place.