Stronger together – digitalising justice partnerships to realise operational benefits 

Digitalisation can tighten collaboration between local stakeholders and responsible authorities to extend the value of Community Safety Partnerships. 

Introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) present a coordinated local response to address challenges ranging from antisocial behaviour and environmental health to community engagement. 

Every CSP unites several stakeholders including the police and fire services, councils and local health authorities. With so many players and so many different IT systems, it’s no surprise that the exchange of information between agencies isn’t always as seamless as it could be.  

 If we consider the current pandemic and the volume of interagency cooperation and information sharing that has taken place. How much of this will have entailed a deluge of emails, phone calls, hand-written forms and scribbled notes. Similar comparisons can be drawn in terms of planning major events, communicating situational awareness and decision making in critical incidents all across various multi-agency command teams at all levels.  

All this back-and-forth communication is time consuming, error-prone and inefficient. It’s also hard to integrate other sources of digital evidence – like footage from drones and  CCTV – into predominantly manual, paper based workflows. This siloing of systems and resources makes it hard to get a joined-up picture of the problem and build an effective solution. The challenges of poor situational awareness have been highlighted in a number of high-profile incidents, where agencies holding their own separate piece of the jigsaw puzzle failed to share information with tragic results. 

 At Motorola Solutions we’re engaging with stakeholders across the UK to explore how we can digitalise their communications and enable a quicker, more efficient coordinated response mechanism. An example of this is giving other stakeholders access to CommandCentral, our end-to-end workflow platform that integrates all phases of incident awareness, analysis, records management and reporting of an incident.

CCTV footage ingested to the system by the local council, for instance, could be viewed remotely by a police officer without the need for travel to council premises. Centralised knowledge sharing also raises exciting opportunities to enhance and extend the effectiveness of CSPs beyond their original remit to offer improved care and support to our communities at a local level.