Portsmouth crime reduction partnership deploys cloud business intelligence

A business crime reduction partnership in Portsmouth has deployed a cloud-based business intelligence system from Hicom to help collate crime incidents and identify prolific offenders.

The Portsmouth Business Crime Reduction Partnership (PBCRP) has selected the NBIS (National Business Intelligence System) from Hicom. PBCRP operates across the entire city of Portsmouth ands works in collaboration with Portsmouth City Council, the police and other community organisations.

As a voice for local businesses, PBCRP works to make the city a safe place for both staff and visitors. Prior to selecting Hicom, PBCRP relied upon a Shop Watch scheme organised by local retailers. However, as the Partnership grew, it was recognised that a more sophisticated data collation tool was required.

Mark Walsh, crime manager for PBCRP, said, “One of the key attractions for selecting NBIS is that it is web-based. As a partnership, we collate and store a lot of data each month, so we needed a system capable of managing this information effectively. As Hicom hosts the system on its own servers, we are confident that our data is stored securely and safely within a data centre that demonstrates the highest security standards.”

PBCRP is using NBIS for the effective management of its exclusion notices. The police system only records data for reported crime, and there are a number of incidents that happen across the city in which the police are not called.

However, every incident, regardless of police intervention or not, is always recorded by PBCRP members in the form of an incident report, which is then put into NBIS. Using this information the partnership can liaise with the police and inform them if somebody breaks their exclusion notice or is still actively shoplifting in the area.

Walsh said, “NBIS can help to bridge the gap between arrest and prosecution. Moving forward we hope to be able to use the system to present bad character evidence in court to help prosecute repeat offenders. We’d also like to use the system to help set up a bank safe scheme and a secure identity scheme.”