How to Determine Your Priorities

Preparing your strategic assessment is about deciding on your priorities based on the information you have about your area. This is also part of having an ongoing intelligence-led business processes. You can approach prioritisation by understanding what poses the greatest threat or risk to the safety of your local community. Using a risk management based approach to prioritisation can help you to balance the demands of the political environment, performance targets and local community needs.

Partnerships are expected to take a collaborative approach in ensuring that key priorities, vulnerable neighbourhoods and key individuals are properly identified and resources applied appropriately and effectively in order to bring about improvements and reductions in crime, improve cohesion and reduce offending. Partnerships should ensure that they can identify and target the key individuals and key places that cause most disruption to others.

A small number of problematic localities or individuals can have a disproportionate effect on crime and that by tackling these, they have a significant positive impact in reducing overall crime and addressing the important issues to communities.

In addition, partnerships could pre-emptively intervene with both young people at risk or those who are vulnerable to being involved in offending behaviour and can also offer comprehensive support for those returning from prison etc and that plans should be agreed and implemented across all agencies. These plans should be robust enough to include both short-term and long-term considerations.

In developing the analysis of the level and pattern of crime, disorder and substance misuse, we recommend that the partnership consider:

Using relative targets and peer comparison – Most Similar Groups (MSGs) are designed to give a peer comparison for relative performance on police recorded crime so that a partnership can evaluate whether performance is at the level expected when compared to areas that face similar circumstances.
Addressing local inequities and gaps in performance – in particular communities and/or neighbourhoods – through local analysis of partnership data.
Considering changes in these patterns by comparing different periods of data. Analysis of why the changes may have occurred will involve identifying and testing a set of hypotheses. Often these hypotheses can easily be tested using existing data sources and it may also be beneficial to consult the community regarding their views on the reasons for changes.
Considering how regional and national issues (e.g. human trafficking, drug trafficking) may be manifesting as local community safety issues (e.g. prostitution, increased substance misuse) will also help to identify reasons for changes in levels and patterns.

You can access useful tools and information sources for obtaining peer comparisons, comparing different periods of data and testing hypotheses through iQuanta. A weblink to iQuanta is included in Appendix A. However, this tool is based on police recorded crime and is only available at community safety partnership level. Therefore, further analysis of additional datasets within the partnership will be required to create a more detailed picture.