Gwent PEEL 2016

Gwent Police is good at preventing crime, tackling anti-social behaviour and keeping people safe. Community engagement is an important component of the force’s policing strategy and it links directly to the objectives contained within the police and crime plan and the chief constable’s delivery plan. The way the force is organised helps it to engage effectively with its communities and to identify and tackle neighbourhood problems using a recognised problem-solving approach. It has systems in place to identify current and emerging trends and determine local priorities.

The force works well with partner organisations to develop solutions that prevent or reduce crime and anti-social behaviour and keep people safe. It uses social media effectively to update local communities on police activity and outcomes. Gwent Police has looked beyond its own boundaries to learn what works, to find new ways of working and to improve the services it provides to the public.

Gwent Police is good at investigating crime and reducing re-offending. The force is generally effective in the way it gathers evidence at first point of contact and uses a nationally recognised risk assessment model to assess calls received from the public. The force places the victim at the centre of all crime investigation, and victim satisfaction is high.

The force has made considerable investment in providing effective digital forensic support and makes good use of mobile phone download technology and evidence from body-worn video cameras. This has resulted in a reduction in backlogs in analysing data from mobile devices and swifter prosecutions of some of the more serious and harmful offenders.

The force has an effective integrated offender management programme working with partner organisations, which it aims to extend to include serious violence and domestic abuse offenders. It also has effective multi-agency public protection arrangements to manage with partner organisations the most high-risk violent offenders and registered sex offenders. The force does not have a robust process to make sure that it is making progress with its activity to arrest wanted suspects.

Gwent Police is good at protecting those who are vulnerable from harm and supporting victims. The force works hard to understand the nature and scale of vulnerability. At a local level, cases involving high-risk victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse are reviewed and plans are put in place to support victims or tackle offenders. Vulnerable people are a clear priority for the force at both strategic and tactical levels.

The force has implemented new systems recently to improve its service to victims. Some staff have been trained to use a formal risk assessment tool but its use and documentation are inconsistent. The force does not have an automatic system to identify vulnerable and repeat victims, but all calls we examined were correctly graded with an appropriate response.

The force’s response to missing children is good and processes are in place to identify and tackle child sexual exploitation. Domestic abuse is still a clear priority and good progress has been made against the force’s domestic abuse action plan.

Overall, the standards of investigations undertaken by the force are of an acceptable standard. The force has continued to reinforce its commitment to victims and routinely updates victims with the progress of investigations.

Gwent Police requires improvement in tackling and preventing serious and organised crime. It has a limited understanding of the threat posed to its communities by serious and organised crime. It is, however, taking steps to improve its understanding and mapping of newer threats such as organised child sexual exploitation, foreign national offenders, modern-day slavery and cyber-crime.

Local officers are now very involved with work and intelligence-gathering on organised crime groups. Gwent Police has been developing its own approach to managing serious and organised crime offenders to prevent offending and to protect the public from organised crime groups. The force reviews each of its organised crime groups on a monthly basis. But its serious and organised crime local profile has limited information or analysis of priority locations and vulnerabilities, criminal markets or gangs.

The force is working well with the College of Policing and Cardiff University to develop specialist cyber-crime capabilities. The force is in the early stages of developing an approach to preventing people from being drawn into serious and organised crime and is looking to expand the existing programme to serious and organised crime, violent and high-risk offenders, with a cohort of domestic abuse perpetrators.

Gwent Police has governance arrangements in place through its Strategic Policing Requirement (SPR) governance board to oversee each of its national policing responsibilities.

The force has completed threat assessments for some SPR threats. The force has completed some problem profiles, but accepts that its current approach is inconsistent and there is a need to develop standard operating procedures across the region. It has tested its response to several SPR threats through a series of comprehensive multi-agency exercises, but not all six threats have been tested to this extent.

The governance board has direct links into TARIAN, the Southern Wales Regional Organised Crime Unit, which covers the three Southern Welsh forces and plays a crucial role in identifying, disrupting and dismantling organised crime.

The force and the Southern Wales region carry out a comprehensive armed police strategic risk assessment to enable them to accurately assess the level of threat and risk to the force and the Southern Wales region.

The force is involved in a programme of practical and theoretical exercises as part of the joint firearms unit response, together with partner organisations.