Sussex BCRPs link in county-wide information-sharing scheme

Crime Reduction Partnerships in Sussex, working with Sussex Police and BCRP Intranet, have developed an integrated county-wide information sharing system. Now Partnerships can more efficiently keep tabs on mobile offenders, by quickly and easily exchanging intelligence.

One problem for BCRPs is that the more successful they are in excluding offenders, the more likely the offenders are to move into neighbouring areas. The answer is to make it as difficult for them as possible to operate in neighbouring areas too - by enabling Partnerships to efficiently share good local-level intelligence. In this way an offender active in a new area can be identified as soon as possible, and monitored. If the individual can be shown to be offending there, he or she can be excluded sooner rather than later.

BCRPs in Sussex, working through the Sussex Business Crime Group and with Sussex Police, have developed an Intra-Partnership Information Sharing Protocol which helps to ensure that if any individual known to one Partnership moves his or her field of operation to another Partnership area, intelligence and mugshots can quickly be issued to Members.

The Protocol stipulates that participating Partnerships must have an Information Sharing Agreement with Sussex Police, that the Administrator of an Acquiring Partnership must record a Rationale (which must be available to the Data Subject in the event of an Access Request) each time information is shared in this way and that the acquiring Partnership must display any information regarding the Target for identification purposes only, and until either the individual can be shown to have offended in the new area, or until the exclusion imposed by the original Partnership expires.

Lisa Perretta, crime manager of Brighton & Hove Crime Reduction Partnership, says: "This is a great step forward in developing BCRPs county-wide. We all focus on driving offenders out of our own areas but by communicating and sharing intelligence with our neighbouring partnerships we can all be one step ahead and ready to target them immediately they arrive in another area.

"Offenders travel across counties to commit crimes, for example organised gangs who commit crime such as refund fraud - stealing in one store and returning to the same store in another area. By sharing this intelligence across the county we can reduce this significantly. It will also send out a strong message to offenders when they are either deterred or commit a crime in another area: I'm sure they will be asking "How do you know who I am?".

Four of the five Sussex BCRPs who have adopted the new protocol are users of BCRP Intranet. Charlie Newman of Littoralis, the company behind BCRP Intranet, says BCRP Intranet makes intra-partnership sharing simple. "BCRP Intranet's automated eNewsletters are the perfect way to share information between administrators, as in Sussex. The fact is, it is local intelligence, distributed locally between members of individual partnerships and, now, between neighbouring partnership administrators, that has made BCRPs so successful in helping bring down the level of crime in our towns and cities".

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