How SPA use crime and other policing data Irene Magill Performance analyst SPA

What is SPA’s role? Scottish Police Authority (SPA) is responsible for: policing principles set out in the Act; delivering continuous improvement in policing; and holding the Chief Constable to account.

How do we carry out these functions? SPA use their performance framework to carry out their monitoring function of policing. The framework consists of: a self-assessment module for SPA to assess their own performance; a set of corporate support indicators; and Performance on a Page (PoP), a set of 20 high level strategic indicators.

What does the PoP look like? It’s now a very big page! The indicators are organised under: the 4 policing priorities set by Ministers; and the 7 SPA strategic objectives

Where does the data come from? Although PoP is wider than crime data, most of the information in it comes from Police Scotland. It includes crime data, workforce information and costs. Other sources of information include SCJS, SNS, Transport Scotland and HMICS. These give us (respectively) survey results on public perception of crime and neighbourhood rating, road casualty statistics and targets and the results of inspections.

How do we analyse the data? The performance team within SPA produce a quarterly report on policing performance for scrutiny by the SPA Board, at a public meeting. The papers are published on SPA website a week before the meeting The report analyses the crime data for individual group 1 to 5 crimes, at National and local authority level. Comparisons are usually between the current period and the same period a year earlier.

What happens to the analysis? Board Members, at their public meeting: discuss issues arising from the analysis; and invite the Chief Constable to set out his own analysis of the issues and his operational response.

Next steps SPA, in their Annual Review, described the degree to which the policing priorities are being delivered. This was not an easy task as there were clearly gaps in the PoP, such as prevention and collaboration (to name but two) Work is now ongoing to fill these gaps, not necessarily by quantitative indicators.

More information? SPA regularly publish information on their performance framework and work in progress under the Performance tab on their external website. Irene Magill or Jackie McKelvie at