Improvements to serious and organised crime investigations being made at Wiltshire Police
Chief Constable Catherine Roper has been responding to a HMICFRS report telling the Force to improve
Wiltshire's Chief of Police says work to improve how the Force investigates serious and organised crime is well underway.
It follows a report from His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) in June which graded the organisation as "requires improvement" in how it tackles serious and organised crime.
Chief Constable Catherine Roper accepted the reports findings, describing it as a "fair" assessment.
"I don't think it was raising concerns that were unreasonable," she said. The report called for improvements in how intelligence is collected.
The Chief added: "We do know in Wiltshire, historically, our management of intelligence hasn't been where it needs to be and we are building our serious and organised crime capability."
Including in the building of that capability is the recruitment of a Metropolitan Police Superintendent with a serious and organised background.
"We haven't had someone with so much experience in that world before," Chief Roper said. "Part of the reason I think we got requires improvement is there were some teams that were in existence previously within Wiltshire
"These actually weren't producing what we needed them to produce, particularly in the world of serious youth violence, and they weren't tackling it. We had to change their make up and we changed their make up just before the inspection came in."
While these changes were acknowledge in the HMICFRS report, the Chief Constable said the next PEEL report the Force receives will be a better reflection of how the changes are impacting performance.
The Chief told us she has no concerns that gathering intelligence is a widespread issue in the organisation, saying it's an area the Force has worked hard to improve as part of its journey out of special measures after being rated as 'inadequate' in 2022.
She said more intelligence is coming in to them as a result of changes made: "What we've done over the last couple of years is reorganise and make sure that we've got the intelligence assets and trained, competent and capable people to manage the intelligence that's coming in.
"The other thing that's happened over the last couple of years is we have actually put more intelligence into the system. So now we've got this glorious situation and we are now trying to guide people on how they can manage it to the best effect."