Rachel has worked for local government since 2004 and studied the Management of ASB at the Anglian Ruskin University, Cambridge in 2006. She is currently Anti Social Behaviour Officer, Active Communities at Waveney District Council. Previous to this she was a volunteer special constable for nine years taking on numerous roles from recruitment to working on the drugs area support team for Suffolk Constabulary. Her current role is to co-ordinate and chair the council’s Anti Social Behaviour unit which covers the area of Waveney.
Rachel acts in a consultative capacity on ASB issues on behalf of the council. Her role is to support police, and other partners in problem solving ‘medium-high’ victim led ASB cases. In July this year she has taken on the lead role on behalf of the local district council in respect of the Troubled Families Initiative (Suffolk Family Focus).
Rachel’s Presentation
Rachel began her presentation by outlining Suffolk’s use of E-CINS, explaining how Suffolk are using E-CINS for their Troubled Families Initiative and for ASB and that they decided to look at E-CINS following an ASB review in 2010 to look at what was going wrong and how they could improve their systems and processes. They found their main blockers were:
The sharing of information
Rachel explained “Within the process of us getting together as officers on the ground, housing officers, social workers, RSLs and anyone who came into contact in cases of ASB, we were asked to look at what were the blockers to stop us achieving the goals we want to achieve? The first thing that every agency said was ‘sharing of information’. The data information sharing process is an absolute nightmare for the officers on the ground – what can be shared, what can’t be shared, we’re all a bit protective.
Engagement of partners
We need to not be working in silos, police were traditionally known to work around ASB and then district councils, county councils, RSLs who also have a responsibility. Finance is always an issue but the ASB co-ordinators had no direct access to money, so when we identified a problem we had to try to get money from elsewhere to solve the problem.
Meetings
I can’t tell you how many meetings I used to attend which I came out of wondering what I had actually achieved there.”
Rachel continued “We had in Suffolk spreadsheets which all our cases were on. Trying to find the information, who was the lead agency, who was responsible etc was on hundreds of files on my computer as was everyone else’s.
The lack of coordination and cohesion between partner agencies was something we had to look at. We were working in silos, we were doing one thing, the police were doing there’s and it wasn’t joined up. We looked at minimum standards. We put ourselves in the shoes of the victim. We concentrated on dealing with the offender – whilst you occasionally updated the victim we didn’t have a system in place to remind us to keep informing the victim. E-CINS highlights victims and repeat victims. You can put the name of somebody in and it will automatically tell you if someone is featured within the system so you automatically know if that person is a repeat caller.”
Tasking
“We launched ECINS in June 2011” said Rachel “We are doing really well a year down the line in using E-CINS for ASB, it’s working extremely well. I can talk all day about how we now only have oner meeting a week, I don’t get frustrated because the police officer I wanted to speak to is now on leave for a week, the RSL hasn’t got back to me etc. The tasking function gets you to do the actions as soon as you see the task. It gives us the ability to task SNT officers and anyone else working on our system We are now in a position where every Tuesday we have a meeting with all the relevant agencies and they have the option to work in the office and we have a police officer who attends at the district council.
The Tasking facility has given us enormous time savings because of all the chasing around we used to do. I can talk about E-CINS in depth as I have been using it for a long time, people sometimes say “I wish it can do that”, I usually find it can you just need to know where to look. It’s a really easy system to use. We went through the tendering process with people charging us thousands of pounds where they were trying to sell the system but saying “this is the system, you can’t change it”. We’ve been making lots of changes on E-CINS to make it suit. The difficulty is getting the agencies on board but as soon as they do it is just a brilliant system.”
Live Data
Rachel concluded her presentation by explaining how E-CINS is accessed in real-time enabling everyone to be kept immediately and constantly up to date. “Our current FIP worker within the unit is able to go out with a laptop, fill out the information and it can be updated live there and then. If we have someone else visiting in the afternoon they will already know someone has been in the morning as it is live on the system. You can use it anywhere.”