Melanie is a sergeant with Sussex Police, she has 24 years of experience in a variety of roles from responding to emergency calls to working on complex murder cases. Melanie is the event manager for Evolve, the support group for female staff and a Protest Liaison Officer, involving her meeting with protest group leaders and police command to help to facilitate peaceful protest in advance and deploying on the protest day.
Melanie has been the ASB and hate incident co-ordinator for the Safe in the City team for the last 15 months. She has been awarded a divisional congratulations for her partnership work recognising the training she has given in the harm based approach, the multi agency sharing of information on E-CINS and the development of the MARAT (multi-agency risk assessment and tasking).
Melanie’s Presentation
Sergeant Locke began her presentation by explaining how 15 months ago she was asked to review Brighton’s situation with regards to ASB and Hate Crime. She found that the current information they held was lacking, information was incomplete, held on spreadsheets and with little knowledge of which agencies were dealing with individuals. As a result they decided they needed a co-ordinated approach. They decided on the following course of action:
Set up a working group – to look at how to take the project forward with all the relevant agencies involved Decide on a lead agency to work with vulnerable victims – the lead agency is not responsible for doing the work, they are responsible for ensuring tasks are being done
Appoint a SPOC (specific point of contact) – to enable victims to have one person they could go to and to enable the team to give and receive updates from one specific person on a case
Set up a protocol around working with vulnerable victims (2nd phase around perpetrators currently being worked on) – Sergeant Locke then spoke about the process of setting up the working group “The most important part is inviting relevant partners because what you need is the different people around the table to make sure we are making informed decisions and that we’ve got the people there that can help us. It’s not just the mental health services it’s also environmental health as we need them to understand the harm based approach together with our armed response officers and our neighbourhood officers and uniformed officers. These have all been trained with a harm based approach”. Sergeant Locke then explained how the harm-based approach training covers how different events and circumstances can affect individuals and trigger responses that can lead to harm to individuals and people around them. “we’ve had victims whereby the noise that’s been caused in a block of flats means they don’t take their medication and when they don’t take it they perhaps use alcohol to relieve the pain and when they drink alcohol then they have suicidal thoughts and then they start ringing other people up and now all of a sudden you’ve got one vulnerable victim that’s effecting the lives of two or three other people.”
Sergeant Locke then went on to show delegates the live E-CINS system and to talk about some of the development features that they are using in Brighton and Hove: “We’ve gone from having 40 high risk victims to coming down to a level of around 8 to 12. This feeds into our MARAT, our Multi Agency Risk assessment and Tasking Meeting. We have around 40 attendees at the meeting including Adult Social Care, substance misuse, mental health, fire, ambulance, 6 RSL’s (dependent if they have a high risk case), FIP, YOS, CRI (crime reductions initiative), street team (for homeless), Brighton Housing Trust (who manage high risk perpetrators) environmental health and council solicitor.
When you click into the vulnerable persons gallery in E-CINS it will tell you the last time someone put a report in about a person and invariably it will be within the last 3 days because when we are working with these people that we’ve identified as high risk we are actually doing some really meaningful work and sharing it in real time. Within 20 seconds that report will be up for other people, once you’ve given them access, to look at and that really does make it so much easier, for me and other people too. I like to encourage agencies to put a tiny bit of information in the box on individual profiles if there is a significant event so you don’t need to trawl through. Certainly one of our cases, which is now archived, we had 200 reports added by an RSL who was initially a little bit sceptical but since attending a brief talk in Hastings really does sing the praises of everything that is happening.”
“It just makes it so much clearer so that if you ask the NPT Inspector in Hove what he thought he had as high risk it would be on E-CINS so if he needed to share that with an RSL it would all be on here and everyone would know it. We wouldn’t all be working independently on spreadsheets”.
Sergeant Locke concluded her presentation by saying how after 6 months she was asked to report on how effective E-CINS and her review had been. “I’ve been talking to the Deputy Chief Constable of Sussex to explain to him what E-CINS is about, what we are doing within MARAT and how far we have come with this. Our work has been featured in the Government’s White Paper ‘Victims First’ as good practice. We’ve continued to work with the Home Office and received the following feedback from them:
“it’s good to see a varied number of different agencies around the table engaged in the management of cases. I found the discussion of cases to be quite smooth and thorough and I was impressed with the way in which agencies took responsibility for agreeing to follow up actions and update the case history. It was evident that there was a good degree of knowledge around the table, allowing agencies to gain an understanding of how other agencies work including what falls within their remit and what falls outside of their remit’.