;)
Opening Context
Leaders of EMOpSS (East Midland Operational Support Service) credited Process Evolution with ‘breaking some myths’ about how policing was being delivered and providing the detailed evidence to develop a new integrated service covering four counties that has improved performance as well as produced cashable savings of £5.2 million in its first year.
Findings & Recommendations
Findings
- Low utilisation of specialist personnel. Forces could not account for what firearms officers were doing between 30 and 50 per cent of the time, even though the chance of a firearms callout happening in one day was just 3%.
- Higher incidents of crime in cross-border areas at the periphery of individual county police forces.
“Officers will always tell you that they are very busy. What the data showed us was that their utilisation against their specific skillset was generally fairly low.” Chief Superintendent
Recommendations
The change team considered a range of reorganisation options and assessed these with evidence and advice from Process Evolution. This resulted in the following main final recommendations:
- Combine roads policing, serious collision investigation, armed policing and a range of specialist training across the four counties of Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.
- Create this new East Midland Operational Support Service (EMOpSS) with borderless command to cover 5,255 square miles and 2.9 million people.
- Bring together responsibility for roads and armed response into a new unit called RARV (Roads and Armed Response Vehicles) to increase officer utilisation, whilst improving flexibility in responding to demand across the region.
- Standardise firearms and other specialist training programmes across EMOpSS to reduce costs and abstraction rates.
Outcomes from the Project
Performance improvements
After the initial two-month transition period, the newly reorganised service was achieving high standards of performance and these standards were maintained or improved in the months ahead.
Budget savings
The implemenation of EMOpSS resulted in a combined real-term budget reduction of £5.2 million per annum compared to the original baseline cost in the first year. In the following year, the budget was reduced again by a further £1.5 million.
Improved focus and flexibility
Specialist teams and command structures, determined by need instead of the traditional geographic borders of those forces, are allowing officers to quickly respond to incidents where the need is greatest.
Resilience in the face of new threats
The combined operational force has greater capacity and resilience to respond to major threats such as terrorism.
In their article on the collaboration, Police Professional commented that independent analysis, like that provided by Process Evolution, was important because: ‘it can help identify processes that could be streamlined and can isolate problems that are not apparent on a region-by-region basis, but which become clear in a multi-force approach.’