The Prolific and Priority Offender Strategy (PPO) is mandatory and involves local agreements with criminal justice agencies to formalise a co-ordinated approach in dealing with prolific and priority offenders.

Prolific Offenders are those individuals who are locally identified as people who are committing high levels of acquisitive crime, namely robbery, burglary or vehicle theft.

Priority Offenders are those who have been identified as being responsible for causing serious disruption to local communities either by anti social behaviour or criminality that does not fall within the criteria for prolific. Examples of which include drug dealing, prostitution or repeated anti social behaviour. In the case of priority offenders there is a presumption that a local problem solving approach has been tried and failed.

The PPO Strategy provides criminal justice agencies with a direction to prioritise our scarce resources by targeting those regarded as the most troublesome offenders. The implementation of ‘end to end offender management’ and the Criminal Justice Act 2003, reflects the need to target PPOs and our future delivery expectations will be premised on all teams having PPO ‘champions/leads’.