'Criminals escaping justice' due to IT system

A police IT system is "unfit for purpose" and causing some criminals to escape justice, officers have told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme.

Nine forces in England and Wales use Athena, which promised to speed up the detection of crimes.

But officers say it regularly crashes and is overly complicated, meaning some cases are not built in time or dropped.

Developers Northgate Public Services apologised for problems "in small areas", which it says it is fixing.

A joint response from the nine police forces said Athena - which has cost £35m over the past 10 years - had been "resilient and stable, although no system is perfect".

The system was introduced following a government directive for forces to share intelligence after the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in 2002.

Officers say the intelligence-sharing function works well but problems arise when they use the system to build cases for the Crown Prosecution Service.

The delays it causes means officers can struggle to get the information together in time to charge suspects or the cases are not up to a high-enough standard and are dropped.

Serving officers at Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex told the programme the process could now take up to twice as long.

We have not named the officers because they could face disciplinary action for speaking out. Their comments included:

• "The first two weeks it was brought in were the worst two weeks of my entire career. It's overly bureaucratic. It doesn't understand the police investigative process at all. From day one, it malfunctioned. Four years on, it is still malfunctioning"

• "It often requires information that is totally irrelevant and if you miss just one data entry point (like whether a solicitor is male or female), I have to reject the whole case and send it back to the officer"

• "Even for a simple shoplift, I probably have to press about 50 buttons, with a 30-second minimum loading time between each task"

• "There have been incidents where charges have been dropped because of the inadequacies of the system. There have been cases of assaults, albeit fairly minor assaults, but these are still people who should be facing criminal charges"

• "It slows the whole criminal justice system down. At the moment, it is not fit for purpose. This is the most challenging time I have come across. We're at breaking point already. This has pushed some officers over the edge"

• "When you've got detainees in a custody block who've got various illnesses and ailments, medical conditions that are all recorded on there and they need medication at certain times - it became very dangerous because we were unable to access the records"

The nine forces - which also include those in Cambridgeshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Warwickshire and West Mercia - said in a joint statement that they had been working with the supplier to identify and correct issues as they arose.

"Over the 12 months up to November 2018, there have only been 72 hours of total downtime and there are detailed plans in place of how to manage business when this occurs."

Northgate Public Services, which created Athena, said 40,000 officers accessed the system and benefited from improved criminal intelligence.

But it said it was working to make improvements to the "complex system".

"We recognise there are a small number of areas of the solution where improvements can be made and we apologise for any difficulties this has caused.

"We are working hard with the customer and other parties to make these improvements as a priority."