Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council

Community Safety is at the forefront of the work of Local Authorities and the Police and is of growing concern to residents in light of acts of terrorism, organised crime and violent crime, including knife crime. Stockton on Tees Borough Council remains committed to supporting our strategic partners, including Cleveland Police  in providing safer communities for all in spite of ongoing budgetary pressures.

One of the areas in which we demonstrate this is through the continued investment in the CCTV network across our public spaces and the sharing of CCTV footage with Cleveland Police to support them in fighting crime. From April 2017 – March 2018 we received 1.298 requests for footage in relation to crime investigations of which 826 resulted in further lines of enquiry to support prosecution.

The current process for providing footage is time consuming, requiring manual processes and face to face interaction between Council and Police staff. The average requests takes around 4 hours of Council Officer time and 2 hours of Police Officer time, which can delay resolution and diverts valuable resources away from front line services.

Together with Cleveland Police, we would like to explore opportunities to improve our current approach through digital evidence management. In summary this will include:-

• Exploring and developing a set of streamlined processes to aid a more timely provision of CCTV footage to the investigating officer(s);
• Identifying and evaluating digital solutions to enable the timely capture and provision of CCTV footage to the investigating officer(s);
• Identifying and evaluating digital solutions to reduce staff time through automated workflow processes between the Council and the Police;
• Identifying and evaluating digital solutions to enable a digital evidence repository to centrally capture footage from the range of Council departments, e.g. Community Safety, Licensing and Social Care.

We recognise the sensitivities in collating and sharing digital evidence and understand the need to identify solutions that maintain compliance with GDPR.