Information: The guidance

All police information, from basic inputting of crime and incident reports through to gathering of covert intelligence, will be covered by new national processes being introduced across the service. Here we look in detail at the recently published guidelines on the management of police information (MoPI) and the thoughts of senior officers leading the relevant business areas.

Commissioned by ACPO, the MoPI guidance was released on April 6 (Police Professional, April 6) and forms part of a national implementation strategy that will now assess force capability and readiness. Home Secretary Charles Clarke has written to all chief officers endorsing the importance of a collective, national implementation of the guidance.

So why was guidance needed? The document underpins and assists forces in dealing with the statutory code of practice that came into force in November 2005. These codes and guidance were drawn from part of the response to the Bichard inquiry following the Soham murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, and are a package chief officers must have regard to under the terms of the Police Act 1996. As one chief officer told us: “In the unfortunate instance of another Soham, the codes would be the first thing people go to.”

The code defines policing purposes that establish a lawful basis for information to be collected and used. The guidance document then sets out, for the first time, detailed processes for the collection, recording, sharing, review, retention and disposal of information that supports the business of policing and compliance with the law.

The guidance states that these processes will be defined by the Information Management Strategies (IMSs) of each police force, maintained under the responsibility of a chief officer. This is leading many forces to consider the role of chief information officer as a member of the senior management team with responsibility for controlling information as a corporate resource for the force.

The IMS will identify the information community within a force and define the processes for managing information with partners. It is a key step in ensuring that information can be integrated wherever it is held in the force, evaluated for its value and appropriately actioned.

An IMS will set out responsibilities for information held. These include the purpose for its collection, the safeguard of that information, which business areas will be holding it, controls to ensure its integrity, training to support the management of the information and how a force will comply with national and local security policies and standards, to name but a few.

Record Creation and Evaluation

The principles of recording information emphasise the importance of data quality – ‘getting it right first time’. The principles, which apply to the recording of police information regardless of the format and business area where it is held, are:

• A record must have been created for a policing purpose and includes information that is written, recorded and/or visually captured, for example CCTV, photographs and computer data.
• A record of police information is the start of an audit trail and must identify who completed the record, when it was completed and for what purpose.
• Before recording information, checks must be made in other business areas to see whether it is already held elsewhere to avoid unnecessary duplication.
•  If information is recorded on an individual who is the subject of an existing record, then the record should reflect this.
• If it becomes apparent that the information being recorded is connected to other information then it must be appropriately linked.
• Before recording information, consideration must be given first to any sensitivities in recording it, to ensure that it is given the appropriate Government Protective Marking Scheme (GPMS) marking.

Sara Thornton, Acting Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police and the ACPO lead on