Helen Earp, Community Safety Projects Officer from Warwickshire County Council spoke to us about the ways ECINS is helping to tackle ASB and Troubled Families.
How is Warwickshire using ECINS?
We went live in June this year and at the moment we are using it for two business areas. Our Priority Families Team are using it to manage the Troubled Families Initiative and myself and my colleagues in the Community Safety Team are using it for Anti- Social Behaviour.
There are 5 of us in the Community Safety Team who have access to ECINS and we are using it from a crime reduction perspective tackling anti-social behaviour, particularly Nuisance Motorcycles. At the moment we are piloting it in two boroughs – North Warwickshire and Nuneaton & Bedworth.
Has ECINS changed the way you work?
Completely. Before we had ECINS we didn’t use a database at all for ASB. We are finding that ECINS is enabling us to achieve more proactively. We are able to evidence that it has improved our work to such an extent that we have more in-depth knowledge of perpetrators and are able to identify ASB hotspots.
How is ECINS helping you on a day-to- day basis?
My colleague Martyn and I decided that we wanted to use ECINS as a way of tackling Nuisance Motorcycles. We are fortunate to be located within a multi-agency police station.
We receive police updates every time a nuisance motorcycle is noted within the two boroughs we work across. We input that information into ECINS, logging the location as a Case and the perpetrator as a Profile on the ASB Gallery. Each time thereafter that we receive information on that location or perpetrator we add it to those logs. This builds up a picture of the situation and equips us with the information we need when we meet with the police.
Would you say it’s making a real difference to the quality of information you share with partners?
We are able to drive the work of the partnership because of the quality of information we are storing and sharing. We receive and share information with a number of different partners including the police, Borough Council, RSL’s, Youth Justice Team and Priority Families.
As police resources are getting more targeted we are using ECINS as a way of identifying and supporting their work. We have fortnightly meetings with the police where we look at our data and inform them of how many times a location has received reports, advising them of names we suspect to be the main perpetrators. This level of detail means we can ask for the support of their officers at identified dates and times which saves them time and resources and ensures that actions are properly targeted.
Do you see a benefit in using ECINS for more than one business area?
Yes, we had a case in Nuneaton where a vulnerable victim was identified through the ASB case management system. We logged it on ECINS as a case and received information on 19 different names who the police had stopped in around that location. Using the police logs we linked the names to the case and a warning letter was sent to each of the 19 names. This updated the Actions list to show that they had received a warning letter and this in turn updated the Priority Families Team so they were able to see if any of the perpetrators were individuals they were dealing with as part of the Troubled Families Initiative.
The ECINS mapping tool was very helpful in this case in allowing us to pinpoint where incidents were taking place. We then overlapped this with addresses where the perpetrators lived so we had a good idea about why they were choosing certain locations. This kind of information is extremely useful to the police.
What do you feel is the main benefit you receive from using ECINS?
ECINS plays a valuable part of the SARA model, providing the scanning and analytical part of any problem solving approach. It enables us to be far more proactive and equips us with the knowledge when we go into meetings. By logging all the information from different sources onto ECINS it helps us to highlight areas of concern. We can identify problematic areas and produce targeted action plans looking at the solution before we even meet with the partner agencies’ which is providing the response.
Do you have plans to widen the usage of ECINS?
We are in the process of training the police so that our two boroughs are fully integrated with ECINS. We are also working closely with Trading Standards to get them on board too. It would be of real benefit to us to overlay information about licensed premises on the system. Fire & Rescue are also due to come on board in the near future.
