Sexual Offences Almost Halve During Operation Northdale

I understand this project run by West Yorkshire Police won the overall winner of the 'Excellence in Policing' award (sponsored by Alexander People) at the ACPO EiP conference today.

Congratulations!

Streets in West Yorkshire’s towns and city centres have continued to get safer for late night revellers this summer following the end of a major campaign. Police and partners have said they are very pleased that levels of sexual offences in the towns and cities have remained low and dropped by 48% during the operation Northdale campaign... 

More information here. (Twitter site for WYP is here.)

Thanks to Justin Partridge for this information

UPDATE: Here are all the other winners - click here (thank you to SurreyPA for that link) Congrats to all!

Austere:IT

I am part of a small team which is planning a guerilla conference on a make do and mend approach to using IT in public services. The aim is to create an event that will enable people to exchange ideas and develop new ones on how to make the most of existing IT. Specifically, we hope the (free) event will be a celebration and dissemination of all that can be achieved without purchasing new kit / software / contractor time / bells / whistles etc. (This event will be an antidote to the burgeoning number of other events which are still promising huge cost reductions by paying for just that one more piece of ("waffer thin mint?") IT investment

Please watch this space - there is more to follow - including what we mean by a guerilla conference! (Well - you have heard of guerilla gardening... try thinking along similar lines...!) The date will be towards the end of the year - possibly early into the next.

But meanwhile... do you have examples of where you have spotted or even initiated a change or achieved a result with a deft (and zero or very low cost) use of an existing IT system?

Please post these examples below as comments (or you can email me if you prefer) - thank you!

E-books: now more easily available

When this blog reached 15,000 uploads I turned into an e-book. You can now access and download if you wish, this off Google Docs by going here.

For your information my other blog (Jon Harvey Associates) is also available in e-book form as well (produced when it hit 10,000 uploads) from here.