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Local authorities

Intelligence


Our Intelligence team of specially trained officers can help local authority trading standards services with short and long-term planning, review, threat assessment, case building and evidence presentation. Contact the Intelligence Team to find out how we could help you and to get a quote.

What we can do

Tactical assessments

Monthly short-term reviews of past actions, progress of current operations and recommendations for future tasking and direction. They cover:

  • frequent offenders
  • horizon scanning (emerging patterns in complaints and trader activity, upcoming regulatory changes and other organisational issues)
  • complaints analysis
  • operational taskings (reviews of large complex cases).

Strategic assessments

Annual analysis of the past year and recommendations for the year ahead on tactical priorities, prevention, intelligence, enforcement, reassurance and commercialisation in all service areas. It includes:

  • performance review
  • analysis of intelligence and complaints by service area
  • horizon scanning for medium-term emerging trends in complaints, regulatory changes, partner agency work and other organisational issues.

The strategic assessment drives service planning and can be used together with project planning, sampling, inspections and other measured activity.

Person, business and problem profiles

Profiles to help local authority officers make informed decisions on the best way to progress an investigation. They involve both closed database (available to enforcement agencies) and open source research and include:

  • local and national complaints
  • other agency intelligence
  • financial checks
  • trading history
  • previous prosecutions and convictions
  • intelligence gaps
  • recommendations for prevention, intelligence and enforcement work.

Threat assessment matrix

This process balances the risk of harm to an individual or community from a thematic area (the physical, psychological and economic impact and likelihood of the harm occurring), with the capacity and capability of an organisation to deal with that issue.

A threat assessment score enables the authority to prioritise resources in a transparent and consistent manner. This is used locally to allocate complaints, as well as strategically.

The MoRiLE (Management of Risk in Law Enforcement) model, developed by the police, is used for strategic threat assessment, enabling standardisation of assessment across law enforcement and other prosecuting agencies.

Evidence evaluation and presentation

For complex investigations, the team can collate association charts to give a clear pictorial representation of links between all of the entities involved. These can be used to help understand links, be used in interviews with suspects and become evidence. They can also create timelines displaying temporal data, such as interactions with traders, communications and financial transactions, linking people to events and incidents.

Software that is standard across the law enforcement sector is used for this work.


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