Police Service
The overarching goal for the Police Service is to help secure a safe and just society in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families and communities are properly balanced. Specifically, the Police Service aims to:
- Promote safety and reduce disorder
- Reduce crime and the fear of crime
- Contribute to delivering justice in a way which secures and maintains public confidence in the rule of the law
- Deal speedily and transparently with police wrongdoing
What do they do?
The Police Service has a responsibility to:
- Keep order (and restore it where necessary) and reduce anti-social behaviour
- Reconcile conflicting rights and freedoms of the public
- Improve safety and reassurance of the public, especially those at risk of harm
- Contribute to improving road safety and reducing casualties
- Disrupt organised and international crime
- Prevent terrorism
- Reduce the fear of crime
- Reduce crime through investigation, detection and addressing the causes of crime
- Provide high quality, timely evidence contributing to fairly conducted prosecutions
- Deal with suspects fairly
- Help to meet the needs of victims and witnesses
The police and youth offending teams (Yots)
Each Yot has a police officer seconded to it. His or her role is very often to administer reparation orders and final warnings, but they may be involved in generic work as well. Click for more on Yots.
Information sharing
The police service states that information sharing can be an important weapon in the fight against crime, and is essential to the partnership approach to crime reduction set out in the Crime and Disorder Act.
So long as such disclosure is necessary for the purposes of any provision of the act, section 115 of the act puts beyond doubt the power of any person to disclose information to:
- Police authorities and chief constables
- Local authorities
- Probation committees
- Health authorities
- Persons acting on their behalf
Section 115 does not override existing legal safeguards on personal information. Personal information is still protected by data protection legislation and the laws of confidence and defamation, among others.
This page was last updated on 15 July 2005
