NCJ Number
193663
Date Published
2001
Length
35 pages
Annotation
This document examines existing data on police numbers and provides recommendations for how this data might be improved.
Abstract
These problems were noticed by the corrections made to the Home Office statistical bulletin on police numbers first released in December 2000, to correct the mis-recording of ethnicity in the Metropolitan Police and errors in data provided by other forces. The problems persisted through the attempt to collect interim data to monitor the recruitment of new officers under the Crime Fighting Fund. It was also recognized that the Home Office was obliged to review each of its statistical data collections as part of the national statistics process. It was recognized in the course of this review that there exists an additional business need for broader resource information in order to understand better the efficiency and effectiveness of the deployment of police resources. Forces were contacted and asked to provide information on their current systems in order to better assess the ability to respond to a revised requirement on police numbers. The new requirement for data was based on a number of assumptions, including the development of a single unified requirement for data on police force employees, a common national data model for statistical information on police force personnel, and supplying information on police personnel to the National Management Information System (NMIS). It was anticipated that data that could be produced in automated reports through NMIS should be available at any point in the year, but that the new Home Office requirement would establish a framework for the routine reporting of data to the center. It was also proposed that management information consisting of the headline count of police numbers and the key data on inflows and outflows were collected routinely every quarter. The NMIS system would need to change to reflect the requirements for the provision of both summary data in statistical tables, and individual records of anonymised personnel data. Annex