Police Technology & Data

As I conclude my two year tenure as Chair of the National Police Technology Council which is comprised of the 50 technology leaders in UK policing, I have been reflecting on a few of the successes, challenges and disappointments over the period and the opportunities that lie ahead.

Looking Back

Three years ago I wrote a short piece on delivering police technology . Since then there have been fundamental changes globally, across the UK, for policing, technology and for many of us personally. ?In January 2020 we could not have imagined the challenge and tragedy that would unfold as a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Many people suffered and lost loved ones during this awful time. There were of course also fundamental issues and challenges for policing and also by implication for our police technology and data services.

During the pandemic the demand on policing shifted significantly with, for example, reductions in burglary and robbery replaced by complex Covid related offences and the need to support and police communities in very difficult circumstances. In terms of technology the Single On-Line Home for policing was well placed to assist with this demand. Policing was able to put in place in very fast time a national public facing solution to enabling the public to self-assess and, where appropriate, to report offences. This service is Met built and hosted, led by the National Police Chiefs Council and sponsored by the Home Office. The service continues to reduce call centre demand (a huge issue across policing) and provides a digital access channel for reporting crime, anti-social behaviour and other non-emergency issues.

In the Met in 2020 we had fortunately already implemented Office 365 and deployed new laptops and tablets to our mobile officers and staff. I don’t think anyone would have predicted the pace of business change or our reliance on products like Teams for our day to day business during the pandemic, something which of course continues today. Office 365 is now deployed across policing, enabling us to provide a more flexible and inclusive working environment and in force and national collaboration and efficiencies that we could not have envisaged three years ago. We should be proud that the National Police Technology Council, Police Digital Service and the Home Office were able to work collaboratively to make this happen.

New Challenges

Since we emerged from the pandemic we have continued to see significant challenges. Global economic and political events such as the war in Ukraine have had a fundamental impact on society, the availability of investment and even on the cyber landscape. We are in a period where the cost of money has risen and the public sector is not immune to this. As a result we are more than ever focussed on maximising value for money, though inevitably our increasing reliance on technology will lead to more expenditure but this must be focussed on innovation and new capability. We know the pace of change globally and the use of technology to both perpetrate and enable crime continues to grow exponentially. Our officers need appropriate tools to keep on top of the volume and complexity of data that often accompanies even the simplest of crimes.

An example of our drive for efficiency is the take up of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate mundane tasks such as searching records for vetting, data cleansing, and avoiding re-keying where some of our legacy systems were not designed with interfaces - APIs. While there is no doubt that some forces have made significant progress, the Met for example uses RPA to avoid keying data relating to 200,000 crime reports per annum, take up has not been uniform and we should do more to support all forces in this regard.

Dividing police technology delivery into c.50 organisations is probably not the most efficient way to make progress and yet the number of successful shared IT services in policing can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I am convinced that, assuming there are no fundamental changes in governance at the highest level, the right way to maximise delivery is to use the model policing used to deploy Office 365, that is to create reusable commercial approaches, a shared technical design and delivery centre(s) of excellence to support forces to deliver at a time that meets their local needs.

In general progress has not been as fast as I would have liked in the last 2 years and, despite the chair of NPTC being a voluntary role, I feel I must take some responsibility for that. In our defence there have been a number of distractions that have maybe meant that NPTC and our partners in the Police Digital Service have been over focussed on structural changes. For example, planning for changes in how central police technology is delivered including moving the majority of police IT systems from central government to the ‘sector’. I understand the arguments for doing so but with public services and our front line are under intense pressure time will tell whether this will have the benefits claimed.

We are of course reliant on technology providers and the police technology market is relatively small with for example just two leading Records Management System providers. Our digital strategy recognised this challenge and was clear that we needed to stimulate the police technology market but progress has been slow and the delivery of large scale technology change is not helped when systems are not architected for the sort of incremental delivery that we know reduces risk. Work in Cumbria where they are engaging a new provider to the police market could be a first step in widening the RMS marketplace and that is to be welcomed but this is at best a medium term project.

More locally the strategic challenges in the Met have been well publicised and our mission to increase trust, reduce crime and raise standards have been clearly set out by all. Such a mammoth task isn’t something we can do alone and while we engage with key partners in the justice and social sector, we have also engaged many partners the technology sector to help us understand the opportunities in data and technology. I was recently able to discuss our emerging plans at a cross-sector techUK event and the feedback has helped us shape the way forward using data and technology to be more precise in our use of scarce resources, understanding and responding to the needs of Londoners.

Innovation and opportunity

Looking ahead I remain optimistic and I believe we should focus on three things: maximising our existing capability, innovation and our people.

In terms of maximising existing capability the two areas I would prioritise are cloud and robotic process automation. I have already mentioned robotics and many forces have also invested in cloud technology often as a more flexible and cost effective approach to hosting services and increasingly to provide a more economic storage solution for the huge amount of data that are now part and parcel of any business but especially an investigatory one. However, not all forces have been able to maximise the benefits of cloud technology or have the scale of the Met police where we have been using cloud to deliver some of our key systems for over 5 years. We simply must get better in policing at sharing best practice, designs, commercial and technical approaches as we did for the delivery of Office 365. I hope that colleagues in the Police Digital Service are able to support an expansion of this approach.

Innovation comes in a number of forms and one organisation’s innovation is another’s steady state so do indulge me a little if I talk about what we are doing in the Met.

• We have focussed on low code, no code development as a way of stimulating ideas from our front line on how we can better use technology, enabling us to stand up rapid proof of concepts using in some cases ‘citizen’ (officer and staff) developers. I am told the Met are the largest PowerApp user in the justice sector globally.
• In the Met, in common with many forces, we have data in multiple locations and systems. Rather than creating a further silo that relies on a specific product we have built a first generation cloud based data platform to unlock our data from our legacy systems and apply analytics and scientific techniques in key priority areas. One such area is assessing the risk posed by offenders who commit violence against women and girls. We are also publishing 100,000,000 data items per year for partners to bring greater transparency to our work.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) covers a wide range of solutions from Live and Retrospective Facial Recognition to some of the latest Large Language Model services such as Chat GPT. These technologies offer significant opportunities for us and also need to be used ethically, ensuring that bias is understood and eliminated technically and via our understanding of the limitations of technology. In the Met we engaged the National Physics Laboratory to ensure that the facial recognition technology that we are using is configured to eliminate any statistically significant bias in regards to race and gender. As policing considers the use of AI one of the better aid memoirs to help ensure an ethical approach I have seen is ALOGO-CARE an example of the considerations that must be front of mind if we are to maintain trust in our approach to the use of these new technologies.

Our People are key to all that we do. The College of Policing and others are devoting significant efforts into ensuring that our investigators are equipped with the knowledge required to investigate digitally enabled and perpetrated crime but what about our data and technologists themselves?

If one considers professions such as lawyers or accountants, we wouldn’t think it appropriate or indeed acceptable for them not to have a standards based skills framework and/or a form of registration or accreditation scheme with appropriate continuous professional development.

Considering the police digital, data and technology profession, work has started in policing on adopting a skills framework but we are behind central government in widespread take-up and the use of ?an an associated accreditation scheme.?This is something that I believe we can and should address in the short term. Adopting a recognised skills framework, particularly one aligned to other sectors will assist with recruitment, enable us to benchmark skills and we owe it to our people, working with the College of Policing, to continuously develop them professionally.

Darren Scates - June 2023

Darren Scates is the Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer at the Metropolitan Police Service London and has over 30 years’ experience in the delivery of technology, data and business change in the UK justice sector.?