Timeline of crime

In 2015, a strategic assessment at Devon and Cornwall Police was critical of the siloed approach taken by some officers to crime response. With offences such as domestic abuse, for example, certain officers focused only on the crime at hand and ignored other factors like mental health issues and drug or alcohol problems, and the impact witnessing the abuse might have had on children. This meant officers could miss opportunities to protect those at greatest risk – and arrest the more dangerous perpetrators. However, the analysts who compiled the assessment realised they were just as guilty of the same behaviour. The force strategic assessment – and other products they produced – was being looked at thematically, with links between different data types often ignored. This issue had been raised previously. Several years earlier, one of the lead analysts suggested that a newly-created victim care unit might work more effectively if it had access to information on those crimes most likely to affect victims in the future. As a result, strategic analyst Jenna Thomas suggested that for 2016, the force might get a better understanding of local vulnerability by taking a more holistic approach and looking at data through the ‘lens’ of age groups. The resulting ‘Vulnerability Through the Years’ project would go on to earn her the top prize for strategic analysis at this year’s Association of Crime and Intelligence Analysts awards. Stage one The first step in the project was to divide Devon and Cornwall’s population into 12 age groups, ranging from five years and under through to 81 and over. Ms Thomas then calculated the proportion of the population each age group represented and used crime data for 2015/16 alongside information on mental health, suicides, road traffic collisions and missing episodes to work out the proportion of victims and offenders in each group. The totals were colour-coded to show where figures were higher than expected – green for when the ratio of crime committed or experienced by an age group was of little concern, and red for when a group was demonstrating double or treble the expected offending/victimisation rate. The resulting system allowed easy identification of the crimes or incident types that were disproportionately affecting each segment of the population. For example, it showed that while people aged 11 to 15 made up just five per cent of the population, they were the victims of almost three in ten sexual offences recorded in the force area – so the ‘sexual offences’ category for this group was coloured red. Similarly, while the 57 to 66 age group represented around 14 per cent of the population, it experienced only four per cent of sexual offences and five per cent of hate crimes. “When analysing violent crime in the usual manner, analysts would look at the gender of victims and offending, their age groups, the time of year and so on,” Ms Thomas said. “However, that approach risks missing some of the finer details. “You don’t expect the violence that a 22-year-old male experiences to be the same as for an 87-year-old woman. By taking the age group approach, we can analyse the data for those groups in much more detail to say how they are different to each other.” The analysis also showed how crime and victimisation escalated over the age ranges. No age groups below 11 to 15 years had any ‘red’ statistics, with those children ‘as likely’ or ‘less likely’ to be involved in an offence as the size of the population. However, from the 11 to 15 group upwards, the red labels began to appear – showing this group was disproportionately likely to fall victim to sexual offences and missing episodes, and commit crimes such as arson. These red labels became more frequent with members of the public aged 16 to 17 years, and up until age 37, people were two or three times more likely than they should be to commit, or fall victim to, ‘almost every crime that they should’ based on their percentage of the population. This crucial fact was being missed in