Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing - Home Office

given to aligning recording and charging standard, automatically enabling crime records to be
amended in line with the offence charged.
Missing Persons
Front line officers believe there is a need to apply a more proportionate and risk based approach to
handling and recording missing person enquiries. An early assessment of why the report is being
made and whether there is fear for the safety and/or welfare of the person will be important.
Dependent on the circumstance, it may not be proportionate or necessary to record full details of
the missing person on the first call. Equally, circumstances might dictate it is necessary. The level
of information/detail/investigation required and the most appropriate way of collating it needs to be
continually reviewed. It is also important that where information has been taken previously it is
reused rather than duplicated.
Having reviewed the ACPO definition of missing person, alongside those from other jurisdictions. I
recommend that the ACPO definition is amended to include “fear for the safety and/or welfare of
the person”
Domestic Abuse
This is a difficult and sensitive area and one where officers currently feel they have no discretion or
ability to use professional judgement in any circumstances. In my Full Report I made a series of
recommendations in respect of domestic abuse and would repeat these.
The ACPO definition currently includes adult siblings and is considered too wide. I understand
concerns were raised about excluding siblings due to links with hate crime. This is capable of being
handled in a sensitive proportionate way, outside of this policy.
Over-reliance on pre-prescribed risk assessments and rigid models discourages experiential
learning and a proportionate response.
There is a need to apply a more risk based and proportionate approach to domestic violence
enquiries and record keeping. Adult siblings should be removed from the definition and ensure
systems are able to identify repeat victims and offenders (location)
Road Collisions
Considerable investment has been made into the development of an automated programme to
capture road collision data. The roll out is somewhat delayed and will need to be expedited if the
benefits are to be realised.
It is interesting to note many calls for police assistance relate to road collisions and other road
traffic matters, which do not feature very high in policing priorities
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