Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) is a Scottish Government non-departmental public body with responsibility for protecting children at risk. Referrals are made to SCRA about children who may be in need of legal intervention to help them address their needs and/or behavior. The referral may be made on offense grounds and/or care and protection grounds.

The Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) is a public body of the Scottish Government responsible for certain central services for police forces in Scotland. The SPSA is responsible, among a number of other things, for the Scottish Police Information Strategy.

The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) provides the independent public prosecution service for Scotland, and is a Ministerial Department of the Scottish Government.

The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS) is the collective organization of Chief Constables, Deputy Chief Constables and Assistant Chief Constables from the eight police forces in Scotland. ACPOS has evolved to be the strategic body that oversees and coordinates all aspects of the direction and development of the Scottish Police Service as a whole.

The Integration of Scottish Criminal Justice Information Systems (ISCJIS) is a program designed to bring benefits across the Scottish criminal justice arena by managing the development of information sharing and exchange.

What the SCRA needed

SCRA’s business need was to deal more quickly and effectively with the 30,000 offense referrals they receive each year from any of Scotland’s eight police forces. SCRA asked us to implement a new Standard Prosecution Report (SPR) protocol. This would allow the SCRA case management system to receive all of the relevant data for a juvenile (under sixteen, below the age of criminal responsibility) who had been accused of committing an offense, automatically, accurately and securely.

The complexity of this requirement came primarily from the range of stakeholders involved, each with their own business processes for young offenders, and the sensitivity of the data being handled.

The challenge

  • Each of the eight forces handled young offenders in different ways
  • Three forces sub-contracted their applications management to a third party
  • Each of the forces had changes they were in the process of implementing that affected this project and had to be taken into consideration
  • COPFS had particular requirements to ensure any new processes would not lead to challenges being made in court
  • The system had to be implemented within six months
  • The data being handled was highly sensitive and had to be secure at all times The requirement was to put the new solution “live” simultaneously across all eight forces.

Our answer

We wrote the initial feasibility study for SCRA and ISJIS to define the scope of what needed to be done to achieve SCRA’s goal of importing data on juveniles who had been accused of a crime into their case management system. We got together all the stakeholders to agree on new common processes that would allow data relating to these juveniles to be transmitted electronically. This involved a series of workshops to understand the lower level process in detail and how they would align with any system changes. Business users, analysts and technical staff from all eight forces were involved.

The net result was: changes to the business processes and applications in each of the forces, ratification of these changes by COPFS, and an agreed interface that allowed each force to supply SCRA with the information they required in a standard way. We built an application to accept the data from each of the forces, validate it, and then create a referral record within the SCRA case management system, tagged for the correct office, to allow the local team to deal with it much more quickly.

“As sponsor and part-funder, ISCJIS were delighted with this project, removing the need for thousands of reports to be hand-delivered to SCRA by police officers each year. We were fully aware of the complexity, including the need to protect the business as usual processes of reporting crimes to the Procurator Fiscal. We put our faith in CGI to execute both the ‘soft’ (people) as well as the “hard” technical) aspects of this project. They did a great job.” Michael Jackson, Coordination Manager Scottish Government, Scottish Criminal Justice IT

A success story

The changes made opened up electronic communication channels with an additional member of the Scottish Criminal Justice community, the SCRA. They save police forces considerable time by removing the administrative burden of delivering paperwork to local SCRA offices. This allows warranted officers to do what they do best—focus on front line policing. SCRA staff can deal with cases more quickly and effectively as they are imported directly to their case management system. The approach is faster and more secure, and thus better for the young people involved. Finally: the project itself was delivered on time and under budget; a truly successful partnership.

“From ACPOS’ sponsoring perspective, and the eight forces, this was one of the more successful and painless IT-related projects we have been involved with. I am conscious CGI played a pivotal role in achieving this.” Ruaraidh Nicolson, ACPOS

Key benefits

  • Re-keying of data by SCRA staff, with all its associated costs and potential inaccuracies, has been eradicated.
  • Valuable police time for delivering paper reports to SCRA offices has been saved
  • Sensitive data about young people is now much more secure
  • The elapsed time in getting cases to SCRA’s professional case workers has reduced from days to hours
  • Ultimately young people are getting a better service from SCRA
  • The referral process, designed to allow legal intervention to help them address their needs and/or behavior, is more efficient and effective.

 

Why work with us

SCRA and ISCJIS, who jointly funded the project, relied on us to act as a catalyst to deliver the SPR project. We worked through the business and technology changes required by a wide range of stakeholders to implement a better way of creating referrals. In turn, this better protects both troubled young people and society.

We have a massive depth of understanding of the people and the processes involved in all aspects of criminal justice in Scotland. We also know technology. This combination of knowledge and understanding of people, process and technology makes us the standout partner to work with the Scottish criminal justice community to make change work.