By Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporting Service

AVON & Somerset’s top police officer has defended her force following criticism from government inspectors over how it investigates crime.

In February, the Police Efficiency, Effectiveness and Legitimacy (PEEL) report, published by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, found delays in criminal investigations being allocated to officers and that supervisors were themselves managing between 80 and 170 of cases yet to be assigned.

It said: “The constabulary should carry out timely investigations into all reported crimes, and make sure that officers take all investigative opportunities.

“Without the timely allocation of investigations, creating investigation plans, and proper supervision, the constabulary can’t provide an appropriate service to victims of crime.”

Now Chief Constable Sarah Crew has outlined how the force has responded, including beefing up CID teams and trialling artificial intelligence to speed up trawling through masses of clues and evidence.

Speaking during the monthly police question time grilling by police and crime commissioner Clare Moody, the officer said there had been a huge rise in overall crime, as well as a spike in complex cases for investigators to deal with.

She said: “In 2024 there were about 13,000 extra crimes, so that is having an impact.

“There have been some delays in that classification and allocation process.

“As a result, what we’ve done is invested in people and in training for those people so that we’ve got the right resources at the front of that process to record the crimes and allocate them appropriately and quickly.”

Chief Constable Crew said that in 2014, an average officer investigated 13 offences a year but that this had soared to 40 last year.

She said: “They are also more complex.

“Internet child abuse teams in 2024 saw something like a 1,500 per cent rise, so in actual numbers, that’s about 1,250 extra crimes which are very complex.

“In 2024 we saw a 207 per cent increase in rape and serious sexual offending – that’s about another 4,400 crimes.”

She said that in Avon & Somerset, the national police uplift programme to recruit more officers over the past few years was focused on growing CID teams but that building the skills and expertise to investigate complicated crimes had taken time.

The officer said the word ‘unallocated’ suggested that a case was ‘just sitting there and nothing has happened’ but that this was not the case and there was immediate oversight by a sergeant when a crime was reported in case urgent action, such as protecting the victim, was needed.

Chief Constable Crew said: “The average time of a rape crime to be allocated now is 1.8 days, which is a massive improvement of where we’ve been in the past.

“The fact that we’ve been able to reduce the time that those crimes are allocated at a time when we’re seeing massive numbers of crimes shows that we have made some significant progress.”

Ms Moody said only just over one in 10 reported offences resulted in a ‘positive outcome’, such as a charge or caution, and that the public felt the police did not take enough action to investigate.

The chief constable said: “I completely understand the concerns people have and the perception it creates.

“It’s an area that we’re working really hard to improve.

“There is a serious amount of senior time and investment in focusing on improving our investigative standards.

“But it’s not just about people, it’s also about the use of technology.

“One area is an AI tool called Soze which is tried and tested, it’s used in the southern hemisphere.

“We’re the first force in the northern hemisphere to be trialling it.

“It uses AI to do a lot of the analysis of all that digital footprint – social media, phones, CCTV images – altogether to help the investigators trawl through what are mountains of data.

“That speeds things up and it means we get to the clues much quicker.

“In our testing we have real examples where we can point to where we found information that we wouldn’t have found by other means much quicker and it has helped us charge a case.

“That has been applied in some of those most serious cases where there is so much of that information.”

She said another piece of technology being trialled by the constabulary used an algorithm to identify crimes that stood the best chance of being solved so they could be prioritised.