Report Summary
This report provides members of the Policing Performance Committee with an overview of an overview of the Progress Towards HMICS Recommendations in respect of Policing Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation.
To provide members with an overview of progress made by Police Scotland in response to the Recommendations made by HMICS in its Strategic Review of Police Scotland’s Response to Online Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation published in February 2020 and its subsequent progress review, HMICS’ Review of Online Child Sexual Abuse, published in August 2021.
To access the full document please open the PDF document above.
To view as accessible content please use the sections below. (Note that tables and some appendixes are not available as accessible content).
Meeting
The publication discussed was referenced in the meeting below
Policing Performance Committee - 7 December 2022
Date : 07 December 2022
Location : online
NOCAP Allocation
NOCAP undoubtedly remains an essential investigative option as we seek to improve the safety and wellbeing of people, places and communities in Scotland. OCSAE investigations are conducted by both Police Scotland’s Local Policing teams and the NCAIU. The rigour applied to risk assessment and triage is more comprehensive than it has ever been.
During the pandemic, Police Scotland transformed its approach to the allocation of OCSAE investigations generated through the NCMEC referrals and NOCAP process.
Prior to the pandemic around 80% of the investigations generated through this process were allocated to Local Policing. This has been reversed, NCAIU now takes 85% of these investigations helping to bring national consistency to risk assessment, triage and prioritisation. While this transformation began through the Operation PARROR Task Force (September 2020 - March 2021) it was the post-PARROR NCAIU small staffing uplift that allowed the NCAIU to cement these processes and sustain its hugely increased level of NOCAP allocations post Op PARROR and to date.
Despite improvements in process and pro-activity the wider demand challenges described earlier remain. These will only be resolved when all parts of the system are truly in equilibrium and resourced to a level that manages workloads and associated risk to a level the force is comfortable with.
NCAIU has formalised and introduced a Risk Assessment & Prioritisation Strategy to continually improve our response to prioritisation of NOCAP enforcement, ensuring finite resources are deployed against the highest risk.
On a weekly basis liaison takes place between the NCAIU Senior Investigating Officers (SIOs) and the Digital Forensics NOCAP Team to plan and schedule enforcement for the following week. This ensures appropriate planning to maximise the scarce Digital Forensic resource. There are factors which can impact on the successful outcome of enforcement, but with circa 85% of suspect NOCAPs being actioned by the NCAIU, the forecast provides flexibility to deploy to other enforcements where challenges are experienced. This approach is explored with Local Policing but there is not always the wider flexibility to allow redeployment to an alternative job. Ongoing liaison between NCAIU OCSAE SIOs and their relevant Local Policing counterparts seeks to minimise this, but it can mean a very small number of DF support slots are not maximised.
