Simon has 23 years police experience and is a Chief Inspector of Staffordshire Police. He has extensive experience of Justice Services and Integrated Offender Management (IOM) having held strategic leadership positions for both in his home Force. He also currently has thematic lead in his Force on Troubled Families and Electronic Monitoring (of offenders).
He has worked extensively with a wide variety of partners in designing and delivering an IOM Programme, spanning all areas of Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent. The programme is widely regarded as one of the most progressive and robust in England and Wales.
Simon is also an experienced Senior Investigating Officer, having held previous posts as a Detective Chief Inspector and Detective Inspector.
Simon’s Presentation
Speaking on behalf of his team and the agencies involved in the partnership Chief Inspector Tweats explained how Staffs and Stoke-on-Trent’s IOM Programme began with agreeing the vision for their IOM Programme which is headed up by the ACC together with their Chief Constable.
“To reduce crime and enhance the safety of our communities by preventing the offenders of today becoming repeat offenders. Our focus is tackling the causes of offending behaviour to break the destructive cycle of crime and enable offenders to make amends to their victims and communities’
Ch Insp Tweats said “We carried out a piece of work at an IOM summit from Director level, Chief officer level sharing views about the most chaotic offenders who were demanding the services of the police, probation, prison, health, local authorities and more. That was the kick off to IOM and the key point is that without that approach at executive level it will end up being a bottom up approach that will go so far and no further. You need to get everyone on the same page. We have an ACC who absolutely gets it and a Chief Constable that drives it forward and that is all encapsulated within a governance structure that sits underneath our local criminal justice board, again another key point in clear and directive governance structures in which IOM sits.
The governance is then cascaded down from our local criminal justice board through to our strategic IOM group chaired by Mr Blazeby. All of the partners that attended our IOM summit – health, local authority at district level and county level together with city authorities together with police, probation, prison, youth offending service and community voluntary sector – all are active attendees of a dynamic active group that has enabled us to make significant progress.
Another key point in relation to that is that IOM is not the sole preserve of the police and if that is the approach that forces take then it is doomed to fail. We found in Staffs Stoke on Trent that the beauty of delivering IOM for offenders is that there is something in it for everyone. It is really important that everyone sees what is in it for them and takes out of it what they need to.
Inspector Tweats explained that SSOT’s IOM Programme is essentially predicated on two things: Understanding Risk and Desistance Theory.
Understanding of Risk
Ch Insp Tweats said that his team are now absolutely able to understand what the risk of reoffending is and who is at risk of re offending in Staffs. “I can de-construct re offending like it has never been done before and that is thanks to a number of crime analysts, not from the police, but from all of the different partners who were all able to put the right data together to enable us to see differently than we ever did before. We are also able as a result of that to clearly and categorically tell you what the top risk factors are that lead to the highest rates of reoffending”.
He continued “…you would expect me to say that substance misuse is our number 1 but we can tell you what percentage of our re offenders are actually influenced by substance misuse to lead them to re offend. Then it goes on to accommodation, education, training, employment, mental health – these are the key risk factors that enable us to construct a programme that specifically targets those particular risks. So that tells us who we should be focusing on and why.” Ch Insp Tweats presented a graph depicting a typical career criminal … “Our graph depicts typical career criminals whose offending falls and rises in scale as they grow older. He said IOM aims to work coherently with this type of offender so that we can consistently and intensively, through a relentless programme, control and change their offending behaviour bringing forward the age at which they desist and reducing in scale and seriousness the level of the crime that they do.”
Ch Insp Tweats then presented a second graph showing a significant reduction in an individual’s re offending as a result of the relentless programme that the team had put together. “If you multiply that by the 730 offenders that we have at the moment on the programme then that is probably one of the most important things our programme is predicated on. The journey which a typical offender takes is shown on a graph and does not follow a linear scale. We know the offenders will wobble and fall and commit crimes through their journey and the importance of the IOM programme is to spot those moments where they are likely to commit crime and we get into the ‘fleeting foot’ of offenders, this is precisely what we aim to do.
Ch Insp Tweats then explained how the programme is delivered to an agreed operational model, the first part of the which is Diversionary Activity
Diversionary Activity
- Select IOM cohorts,
- control activity,
- change activity
Diversionary Activity aims to ally strategies and interventions to divert people away from the criminal justice system and it focuses on the top four risk factors. “It’s that upstream part that aims to characterise the next generation of prolific offenders and get in early said Tweats. “The selection of the IOM cohorts is informed by the strategic assessment that ensures that we’re targeting those offenders who are most likely to re offend and we construct that with various different cohorts of offenders and offending types.
We then build a cohesion between all of the partnership activity in relation to control and change of offending behaviour. The change activity is the most important part as it is that sustainable activity that takes people out of a life of crime. The work also enables us to better manage the transition between communities and custody settings and vice versa.
What E-CINS enables us to do is not only understand the risk strategically but also tactically so every day of the week we are able to understand the propensities that every one of those 730 offenders have to re offend and we grade that, similar to most other areas. What is dissimilar though, is how incredibly agile and nimble our programme is with regards to how we respond to fresh information and it’s spontaneous and dynamic and the tasking of all our 15 partner agencies co-located, is to be believed when you see those discussions taking place. I mentioned earlier about co-locations, evidence tells us that co-located IOM teams build the richest picture that we can possibly get. E-CINS absolutely allows us to do that and is a critical factor in delivering co-ordinated interventions and services.
The future of IOM in Staffordshire’s Stoke on Trent
Ch Insp Tweats finalised by saying “So where does IOM go from here? Staffordshire’s Stoke on Trent IOM Team largely is based on risk of reoffending. We think it’s a framework that enables us to expand this now into other areas of business. We think that there are other cohorts of offending types that would benefit from this approach and nationally ACPO are very keen and very interested in expanding IOM into other areas of risk, risk of harm essentially such as domestic violence perpetrators, into the MAPPA environment and what it can do there, violent offenders, women offenders and other areas they are very interested in exploring too. We too share that interest and hope to explore it and see what IOM can do to improve and develop that further. We also think there is a pressing need for inspection of evaluation with regards to the IOM programme and the differences that have been made again. The holy grail in most areas is a performance management framework that does what it says on the tin and an evaluation of service that clearly demonstrates what worth you are getting out of an IOM programme. Essentially we want to travel in the same direction that the Government’s going with regards to the rehabilitation revolution and we think that IOM beautifully underpins that direction of travel as well.”