Lincoln BIG, the city’s Business Improvement District, is seeking to manage street drinkers as part of a 12-month project. Pictured: Lincoln Cathedral in winter morning mist.
It’s part of Lincoln BIG’s Security Group work to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in the city centre. Information-sharing software, DISC, is already in use in the city to manage day-time and night-time exclusion schemes.
Lincoln had its own business crime reduction partnership before the BID began in 2005, but with the extra resources that the BID made available, the city has been able to extend membership to all the area’s shops and licensed premises.
Yvette Hall, the Security Group’s coordinator, says: “We took part in an online ‘webinar’ in May, organised by Littoralis, which gave us a really good idea of what DISC could do for us. We were very impressed, and our board of management was keen to adopt the system too. At first we weren’t sure if we would use a single DISC implementation for both the daytime and the night-time schemes. What made us choose to buy two DISC implementations was the fact that it is very important to ensure that each intranet is relevant to each group. Night-time people don’t always want to know about what’s going on in the daytime economy, and vice versa. So we went for two DISC implements – one for each scheme.”
Yvette says that being able to run two intranets (internal internets) from the same ‘admin centre’ means it’s almost as easy to run two DISCs as it is to run one. “Plus DISC allows selected content, like police ‘alerts’ or news items, to be published across both sites without having to enter it twice”.
The BIG group says it had been using the ACIS offender database but it is transitioning to DISC now and will let its ACIS contract expire. Yvette says: “DISC is much easier to use, and we can offer a lot more information to our members. They have been very positive and have been giving us great feedback about DISC. Most of our members are using it regularly now, after just a few weeks.”
Now Lincoln BIG has ordered another DISC, becoming the first BID in the UK to install three DISC systems.
The third one is being used to manage the city council’s street drinking strategy. Lincoln BIG promised to address the problem of street drinking in its business plan for 2010 to 2015 and funding DISC is described as a step towards that. The BID points out that street drinking too often falls between the responsibilities of the main agencies. Policing by day can’t allow much in the way of intervention, and what can be perceived as a problem by shops, and their customers, might not get the attention traders think it deserves.
Lincoln BIG has also part funded an ‘alcohol intervention officer’, Daniel Turner, from the city council to target the problem for a 12-month effort. Important to the success of the project is that the various agencies involved all have a single data resource, to upload incident reports to, and access shared, up to date, information. Also important is a regular communication platform to keep all those involved fully informed about the project.
Yvette Hall says: “DISC is ideal for this. It provides a single system, shared by all the agencies, where they can input data directly, and where the information is kept up to date. DISC’s ‘hot spot’ tracking system means Daniel can ensure that resources are focused on the places as well as the people that matter. And of course DISC automatically generates reports and analytics which are great for feeding back to stakeholders like the council.”
The scheme will use Designated Public Place Orders not only to address and control incidents of anti-social behaviour but seek to ensure that street drinkers are properly managed and directed to appropriate third parties.
For more on Lincoln BIG, visit www.lincolnbig.co.uk
For more about the work of Lincoln BIG Security Group, visit www.lincolnbigsecurity.co.uk
The Security Group ordered two DISC implementations earlier this year.
