Community safety staff and Lothian and Borders Police share office space to enhance performance
We‘ve always worked closely together, but never before have the Council’s Community Safety staff and Lothian and Borders Police (LBP) officers actually shared office space on the scale that they are doing now.
On 17 April, Police officers from the Safer Communities department of LBP’s ‘A’ Division moved into Chesser House.
Police officers are now working alongside their Council colleagues who have the same areas of responsibility.
These include Problem Solving Partnerships, crime prevention through environmental design, hate crime, personal safety and antisocial behaviour performance monitoring.
Also co-located at Chesser House are Police officers involved in drug awareness training and Public Transport Liaison, and a school teacher on secondment to develop a personal safety education programme for secondary schools.
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This new working arrangement will provide a more efficient service for Edinburgh’s residents, with the main benefits being:
- improved information sharing
- greater understanding of each partner’s working practices and shared best practice capacity for ad hoc team/partner meetings
- increased opportunities to plan more joint initiatives
- joint work streams for police and Council colleagues to work together on intelligence-led projects.
THE BENEFITS OF SHARING Community Safety policy officer Tracy Millar and Police officer Ian Park, who are each other’s opposite numbers as liaison officers for Problem Solving Partnerships, are already benefiting from sharing office space.
Tracy says having her Police colleagues sitting only a few feet away has transformed their ability to work closely together.
“Now that my Police counterparts are literally only a desk away from me, we can get the work done a lot more quickly,” she said.
“It’s great to be able to have ad hoc informal ten-minute meetings, which is often all it takes to action something, whereas before you would have had to organise a special meeting just to do that.”
Ian Park agreed. “It makes an awful lot of sense for me to be here.
“I can just turn around and speak to Tracy in person instead of trying to phone each other. Each of us knows when the other is about.
“This co-location means that we will able to start dealing with issues as soon as they arise.”