A few days back, The Register wrote about some of the severe information quality problems occurring within police departments across England. In auditing crime reports, it found that more than 1 out of 3 departments did not meet statutory requirements and that individual crime reports had initial error rates of 15-86%, and error rates of 22% after being reviewed by a supervisor.

I credit the Brits for at least trying to address the problem, and doing it in a methodical and well-thought out manner. Instead of sanctions, they are trying to ensure that “a reverence for data quality must become part of the culture of the police”. I have absolutely no information about this situation other than what I have read, but I would suggest that a system that allows error rates above 20% after review may need to be completely re-worked.

An interesting comparison can be made to the progress being done by William J Bratton and the Los Angeles Police Department with real-time analytics. In the last few years they were able to reduce property crimes by 26%, even with less police officers per capita than most other cities. An article in Baseline talks about how the LAPD had a similar problem with information quality in the past, but has really been able to turn things around, to the point where analytics have become a true crime-fighting tool.

technorati tags:information quality, data quality, police, real-time,  analytics

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Systems Integration, Information Quality, In the News, People, Practices, Understanding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.