Police forces in England and Wales are suffering from "outdated and overstretched" crime recording systems, with many failing to meet Home Office data standards, according to an Audit Commission report.
The report, issued on 21 December 2004, finds that 60 percent of forces are falling short of government standards for crime recording, with London's Metropolitan Police having one of the worst results in the country. Cleveland, Cumbria and South Yorkshire are also named as giving "serious cause for concern" in efforts to comply with Home Office standards.
Technology is one of the key contributors to the poor performance levels, says the report.
"Many forces have incident and crime recording systems that are outdated and overstretched. Integrated systems, in which data need only be entered once, are rare," the report says.
It adds that despite the IT problems, a majority of forces are "working towards" improvements to ensure a "reasonable standard of data quality". But for several forces, errors are inevitable.
"There remain, however, a significant number of forces where systems are too slow or too inflexible," it says. "This can mean that appropriate controls are not in place to prevent unauthorised use of options or codes, that standard formats are not in place to secure minimum data requirements, or that incident and crime data is difficult to audit. The need in some forces to rely on manual processes to address system weaknesses inevitably leads to higher levels of error."
The Commission makes several recommendations. It says that improvements should be made to IT systems that are "excessively slow or inflexible", Police shoud introduce "appropriate controls" to prevent unauthorised use of data codes, provide better access to workstations and cut down reliance on manual processes.
