Community Safety Partnership

Information Research

The Community Safety Partnership recognises the importance of sharing and analysing data to support Community Safety projects and initiatives. In order to provide a service to partner organisations, the Partnership employs a Research and Information Officer/Analyst who is responsible for liaising with every partner agency in order to collect data and provide analysis of this for the Community Safety Partnership.

This assists monitoring the effectiveness of existing projects and helps to guide future planning of projects and budgets for the Partnership. An important part of this is devising appropriate data protocols and procedures, including aspects such as when data should be passed, how often, in what format and what should be done with it once received (including analysis, storage and distribution). All data that is supplied to the Officer is non personal in nature (i.e. no specific individuals can be identified from the data or other sources of information within the public domain).

A variety of methods are used to analyse the data involving databases, spreadsheets and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The GIS plays an important role in data analysis as it provides an understanding of problem ‘hot-spots’ – identifiable areas where specific problems are concentrated (e.g. vandalism, domestic abuse, grass fires etc). This may be at a variety of different geographic scales and areas including street level, Postcode, Council Ward, Town, Police Beat or other defined boundaries. Further to this, GIS can also help in the production of maps showing the location of objects such as Drinking in Public Places Signs and determining where more or less are needed (in conjunction with the above data analysis).

A Community Safety Audit was conducted in 2001 by an external agency commissioned by the Partnership and published in 2002. The results of this are used to inform priorities and projects for the partnership.

The Information and Research officer also responds to ad-hoc requests for information and maps from within the Partnership, Emergency Planning section and other agencies (such as voluntary groups) as well as conducting research on various community safety topics. Also, the Officer is responsible for providing ideas about questionnaire design and analysis for public consultation on community safety related issues and helps provide support for evaluations of initiatives that are submitted to the Scottish Government (such as CCTV evaluations).