ECINS Heather Ette spoke to Sergeant Mick Thorpe, Deputy Safer Neighbourhood Manager, Peterborough
HE: What’s your involvement with ECINS?
MT: We have been using ECINS in Peterborough for around a year, originally just for managing ASB and IOM. It didn’t take long to see the huge benefits that could be derived from expanding its usage to other areas of business. With ECINS its really just a case of thinking outside the box.
We’ve been instrumental in introducing a new gallery to ECINS called “Foreign Nationals”. This new gallery is allowing us to work with partners to share information about repeat offenders that have breached their conditions of being able to live in the UK.
HE: How did the new gallery come about?
MT: Legislation around foreign nationals was introduced last year which meant we needed to record and evidence the type of offences and number of offences being committed by people who had come to the country from overseas. As a result we started to use ECINS to record data on people coming into the police station in Peterborough. We have a procedure which involves us serving the offender with a letter from the UKBA, a letter from our Chief Inspector and information from supporting agencies that essentially outlines a a set of “rules” about how they are expected to behave, the conditions of breaching those expectations and signposts for where to get support if they need it. Our officers also visit the offenders to help ensure they are abiding by the rules and if not, the information is shared with our partners and the offender is arrested.
When the offenders go into custody the prison officers use ECINS to update us and our partners of their behaviour and, as a result of their sentence, we can alert the UKBA to whether the offender should be repatriated.
HE: Does E-CINS make a difference?
MT: ECINS is efficiently and seamlessly tasking and alerting the right people to ensure we take the right steps and have the evidence we need to either get people the support they need or get them repatriated. More and more agencies are wanting to use E-CINS and the more partners we get on board, drug services, housing etc., the better the service we can provide.
The data we are recording is also allowing us to recognise who is causing the most harm. We can very quickly identify the top 20 foreign nationals that are the priority offenders and get a description of their offending patterns. It’s also a secure of way of sharing the full picture with our partners and you can share as much or as little as you want.
HE: How will the new gallery help?
MT: Although we’ve been recording this information since last year having a specific gallery dedicated to UKBA’Foreign Nationals will make it so much easier to manage where the offenders are and the individual guidelines that relate to the individual based on the regulations from their own country of origin.
HE: What else do you use ECINS for?
MT: You can use ECINS for so much more than you can even consider. Gang masters, CSE, Exploitation in the workplace. Operation Pheasant was raised nationally as best practice and we are now using ECINS with Housing and other partners to share information about perpetrators and victims.
