Lincolnshire PEEL 2015

Lincolnshire Police is good at preventing crime and anti-social behaviour and keeping people safe. This is consistent with HMIC’s 2014 crime inspection where the force was judged to be good at reducing crime and preventing offending.

Force priorities reflect a commitment to crime prevention, supporting victims, partnership working and keeping people safe. This commitment is generally well understood throughout the force.

There are systems and ways of working in place alongside a range of powers and tactics, to enable the force to work together with partner organisations to tackle anti-social behaviour and keep people safe. However, effective partnership working at a local level is sometimes hampered by the lack of availability of neighbourhood staff, although those actions which have been taken with partners generally lead to positive outcomes.

The force still does not systematically learn from experiences or have a way to retain and share effective practice. Neighbourhood practitioners are not brought together to share experiences to understand, evaluate and share ‘what works’.

Lincolnshire Police’s approach to investigating crime and managing offenders requires improvement. This is consistent with HMIC’s crime inspection in 2014 when the force was judged as ‘requires improvement’ at investigating offending. Although there has been some improvement since 2014, the force still needs to improve the quality and consistency of its approaches to investigating crime and managing offenders.

Processes for the initial investigation of incidents are based on threat, risk and harm and the allocation of complex and non-complex crimes generally works well. Reported crime has continued to fall which compares favourably with most other forces. The approach taken to investigate crime is improving but there are still inconsistencies across the force. Similarly, there is an absence of well-documented reviews and consistent practices for assessing case workloads.

Progress in other areas, specifically the backlog in phone and computer examinations and an effective offender management scheme, remains under-developed. An additional concern is the backlog in the completion of assessments on sex offenders, which have been temporarily suspended on low-risk sex offenders while officers complete statutory visits on other registered sex offenders.

There are a number of effective activities to divert young and vulnerable offenders away from crime. However, greater integration with partners, improved prioritisation of those causing most harm and evaluation to define what success looks like for the integrated offender management scheme means that the ability to prevent
re-offending is reduced.

Lincolnshire Police generally provides a good service in identifying vulnerable people and responds well to them. However, there are several areas where improvement is needed.

The force generally investigates well crime committed against the most vulnerable victims. However, HMIC is concerned that the force does not always involve the right number of specialists and right level of specialist expertise in complex cases involving domestic abuse and serious sexual offences. The force also needs to improve its supervision and prioritisation of workloads.

Officers attending domestic abuse incidents have a good knowledge of how to assess risk and keep victims safe. HMIC found a robust system of recording domestic abuse offences in Lincolnshire.

The force does not have a co-ordinated or consistently well-supervised process for responding to reports that children are missing or absent. Although it has made a start in improving its response to how it investigates and safeguards missing and absent children, it still needs to do more.

Work between professionals, including those from partner organisations, in the safe team and the central referral unit helps keep children safe, providing effective responses to cases involving increased levels of risk. The force has made a fairly good start in ensuring it is well-prepared to tackle child sexual exploitation but it must now build on this to ensure that this ambition translates into consistent operational practice.

Lincolnshire Police is good at 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 to ensure it can fulfil its national policing responsibilities, so no year-on-year comparison is possible.

The force has a well-developed understanding of the threats it faces and there are mature, collaborative ways of working in place to manage this threat across a large area. The force effectively shares intelligence with partners to tackle serious and organised crime groups and continues to develop a multi-agency response.

There is access to an extensive range of specialist policing capabilities provided by the East Midlands Special Operations Unit. Although this unit is predominantly targeted at the highest harm groups, it also provides support to supplement the effective work of neighbourhood teams who are targeting lower priority criminal groups to disrupt their operations.

The force has robust arrangements in place to satisfy itself that it is fulfilling its national policing responsibilities.