4,500 more crimes ‘found’ by cops after system blunders
OFFENCES ADDED TO 80,000 REVEALED TO BE ‘LOST’ IN DAMNING INSPECTION
GREATER Manchester Police has found 4,500 extra crimes since Christmas that it had initially missed – as it tries to rectify a chronic underrecording issue highlighted by inspectors.
In December a damning report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate had found one in five crimes were not being recorded by GMP, totalling an estimated 80,000 lost offences a year. Since then the force has been carrying out daily assurance checks to see whether all crimes have been correctly identified first time around.
A GMP update to Manchester councillors shows that in one week in mid-February, a quarter of crimes reported in the north of the city had still either been wrongly recorded initially or hadn’t been recorded at all. The force’s checks then resulted in an extra 358 crimes being added into the system for Manchester in that week.
Asked for similar data across the whole force, GMP told the M.E.N. that since December 21, it has added in around 4,500 additional crimes as a result of the new audits – offences that would have been missed prior to the inspection report.
Speaking to Manchester’s communities and equalities scrutiny committee, area commander Paul Savill said the force had identified a number of reasons for crimes slipping through the net.
One related to call handlers not ‘consistently and completely’ transferring reported details of crimes onto the force log, he said.
Secondly, he said there was an issue with the way incidents were being assessed, once on the log.
The so-called THRIVE process regularly cited by the previous chief constable as evidence that no victims were being put at risk – judges the level of threat, harm and risk posed by a reported incident, in order to assess whether the crime needs to be recorded, and in what category. Chief Supt Savill said there was ongoing work to ensure that staff in the force’s communications branch understood the process and knew how to apply it correctly.
GMP’s ongoing audit of crime recording is the direct result of HMI’s damning inspection report in December, which was based on a deep dive into records between April and June last year.
Since then the chief constable, Ian Hopkins, has stood down and the force has been placed into special measures. A major restructure is under way and the force has started a daily audit of its recorded crimes, as well as wide-scale re-training. Inspectors have given GMP six months to resolve its failures before returning, while the Home Office is said to be taking a keen interest in progress.