Greater Manchester PEEL 2018

Greater Manchester Police requires improvement in the way it tackles crime and anti-social behaviour.

The force doesn’t have enough officers to do prevention work. It is seeking to address this by introducing a new neighbourhood policing model. It wasn’t clear to us that neighbourhood officers understood the force’s vision for neighbourhood policing. The force has a draft strategy, but should ensure the workforce puts this into practice.

Neighbourhood officers stated they were frequently abstracted from their duties onto other jobs, resulting in less time problem solving in their wards. The force should monitor the impact of this.
The force recruited 50 more neighbourhood officers this year. This is a positive step.

Greater Manchester Police has place-based teams that collaborate with other organisations to address crime and anti-social behaviour. Less positively, most neighbourhood officers have not been trained recently in problem solving.

We saw good practice in the way the force uses evidence-based practice to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. In particular, its ‘hotspot pulse policing’ operation led to a reduction in crime and incidents.

Greater Manchester Police requires improvement in the way it investigates crime.

The force doesn’t have enough accredited detectives, but plans to address this through recruitment.

The force’s crime management policy means that it finalises some solvable crimes without further investigation. We saw some incidents were downgraded because of delays caused by high demand. Not all callers were told about delays. Some victims distanced themselves from the investigation as a result. This makes positive outcomes less likely. The force should improve its regular and active supervision of investigations.

We found that the force had inappropriately assigned some investigations to neighbourhood officers. We referred these to supervisors.

The force has no clear process for allocating specialist investigators to interview vulnerable victims. It relies on officers volunteering their skills, and staff felt there were not enough of these trained officers. This means that vulnerable victims may not get prompt support. This is an area for improvement.

Greater Manchester Police requires improvement in how it protects vulnerable people. It is still not responding appropriately to some vulnerable people when they are at risk. This means it is missing chances to safeguard victims and secure evidence. We made recommendations to help it improve in this area.

The force needs to improve some aspects of its understanding of vulnerability. Staff assess callers’ vulnerability with a commonly used model, STRIVE (safeguarding, threat, risk, investigation, victim and engagement). But the force only requires the use of this model in sexual offences and hate crime. For other crime types, call handlers are not required to use STRIVE at times of high demand. Consequently the force may not always identify vulnerability immediately.

The force doesn’t always respond quickly enough to incidents involving vulnerable people. We saw evidence of delays caused by high demand. And we saw that incidents were downgraded without a recorded reason.

In our 2017 effectiveness report, we found an area for improvement and recommended the force survey domestic abuse victims. The force hasn’t yet done this. But it does get feedback from victims of child sexual exploitation and victims of hate crime.

We found the force’s scrutiny of registered sex offenders to be robust and its management of them proactive.

This question was not subject to detailed inspection in 2018/19, and our judgment from the 2016 effectiveness inspection has been carried over.

We have previously inspected how well forces provide armed policing. This formed part of our 2016 and 2017 effectiveness inspections. Subsequent terrorist attacks in the UK and Europe have meant that the police service maintains a focus on armed capability in England and Wales.

It is not just terrorist attacks that place operational demands on armed officers. The threat can include the activity of organised crime groups or armed street gangs and all other crime involving guns. The Code of Practice on the Police Use of Firearms and Less Lethal Weapons (PDF document) makes forces responsible for implementing national standards of armed policing. The code stipulates that a chief officer be designated to oversee these standards. This requires the chief officer to set out the firearms threat in an armed policing strategic threat and risk assessment (APSTRA). The chief officer must also set out clear rationales for the number of armed officers (armed capacity) and the level to which they are trained (armed capability).

Some forces in England and Wales have joint arrangements in place to provide armed policing. Greater Manchester Police is a force of such stature that it can provide its own armed capability. However, it shares training facilities with other forces in the North West of England and North Wales.