How SPA use crime and other
policing data
Irene Magill
Performance analyst
SPA
What is SPA’s role?
Scottish Police Authority (SPA) is responsible for:
• policing principles set out in the Act;
• delivering continuous improvement in
policing; and
• holding the Chief Constable to account.
How do we carry out these functions?
SPA use their performance framework to carry
out their monitoring function of policing. The
framework consists of:
• a self-assessment module for SPA to assess
their own performance;
• a set of corporate support indicators; and
• Performance on a Page (PoP), a set of 20 high
level strategic indicators.
What does the PoP look like?
It’s now a very big page!
The indicators are organised under:
• the 4 policing priorities set by Ministers; and
• the 7 SPA strategic objectives
Where does the data come from?
Although PoP is wider than crime data, most of the
information in it comes from Police Scotland. It
includes crime data, workforce information and
costs.
Other sources of information include SCJS, SNS,
Transport Scotland and HMICS.
These give us (respectively) survey results on public
perception of crime and neighbourhood rating,
road casualty statistics and targets and the results
of inspections .
How do we analyse the data?
• The performance team within SPA produce a
quarterly report on policing performance for
scrutiny by the SPA Board, at a public meeting.
The papers are published on SPA website a week
before the meeting
• The report analyses the crime data for individual
group 1 to 5 crimes, at National and local
authority level.
• Comparisons are usually between the current
period and the same period a year earlier.
What happens to the analysis?
Board Members, at their public meeting:
• discuss issues arising from the analysis; and
• invite the Chief Constable to set out his own
analysis of the issues and his operational
response.
Next steps
• SPA, in their Annual Review, described the
degree to which the policing priorities are
being delivered.
• This was not an easy task as there were clearly
gaps in the PoP, such as prevention and
collaboration (to name but two)
• Work is now ongoing to fill these gaps, not
necessarily by quantitative indicators.
More information?
• SPA regularly publish information on their
performance framework and work in progress
under the Performance tab on their external
website.
• Email Irene Magill or Jackie McKelvie at
irene.magill@spa.pnn.police.uk
• Jackie.mckelvie@spa.pnn.police.uk