Policing is an information business. It is, at its heart, an exercise in managing risk using the information available to it. And yet so much of the information available to policing, that could be used to help keep people safe, is not being fully deployed because the police service is not realising the potential of digital, data and technology.
Too many police officers complain of having to enter the same data multiple times on different systems, of not having access to the right technology at work and of having to work with equipment that is much slower and more cumbersome than that which they use in their personal lives. In a 2018 survey 55 per cent of officers were not satisfied with the force’s ICT provision, just 42 per cent said their force’s main systems were easy to use and just 18 per cent said their systems were well integrated. Only half of officers surveyed thought the information on their force’s systems could be relied upon.
Too many national police technology programmes have wasted vast sums of money while simultaneously failing to deliver the transformed service they promised. The programme to deliver the Emergency Services Network, which was supposed to replace the Airwave emergency services communication system, was launched in 2015 but a decade on has still not been delivered and has cost £2 billion. The Law Enforcement Data Service programme began work in 2016, has still not been delivered and has cost (at £1.1 billion) 68 per cent more than envisaged.
Too much police data, far from flowing through the system to enable intelligent decision making, is locked away on local police servers, unable to be shared with colleagues in other parts of the country or with other public service professionals locally. This not a dry technical matter: in a business like policing an inability to share information about people, places and incidents can be a matter of life and death. It is 20 years since the Bichard report into the Soham murders which found that a lack of information sharing between constabularies had meant Ian Huntley was able to become a school caretaker. He went on to murder Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. These issues have still not been adequately resolved.
It is estimated that 90 per cent of the money invested in police technology is spent on maintaining existing and often outdated systems rather than on the new technologies that could transform the service in the future.
We should note there have been some successes: the roll out of Office 365 to all forces during the pandemic, the creation of much easier forms of digital public contact through the Single Online Home programme and the now widespread use of Body Worn Video, are all good examples.
Nevertheless, the big picture is of a police service that has failed to unlock the potential of digital, data and technology. Why has policing struggled to deal with these issues over such a prolonged period? In a new report published this week the Police Foundation identifies a number of reasons. One is that there remains a culture in policing that still doesn’t fundamentally ‘get’ the importance of data to the business and tends to focus on buying ‘shiny new things’ rather than seeing the utilisation of data as a core part of business change.
The police technology market is characterised by a lack of competition which has left the service reliant on a small number of legacy suppliers for core systems. Some of this is because of the specialist nature of police requirements (not many companies can provide what policing wants to buy), but some of it is because of a tendency to demand very bespoke products when actually proven off the shelf solutions would work just as well or better.
Policing struggles to recruit those with the skills required to make the most of the digital revolution: data scientists, technical architects, digital analysts and AI specialists. Procurement processes are so lengthy that by the time solutions are built and deployed, needs and technology have moved on. While there is a lot of good innovation in policing there is currently no real mechanism to test and assure new products so that they can be deployed at scale.
However, the biggest challenge, which was highlighted by all of the experts we interviewed, is the organisational fragmentation of policing. As Dame Lynne Owens said in our recent annual lecture: ‘I have yet to hear a single rational reason why 43 different approaches to IT and infrastructure investment is sensible.’ Large amounts of money are spent on national technology programmes that operate in silos, are insufficiently coordinated and do not work to a single strategy. Most of the power and money is vested in 43 police forces who make their own decisions around procuring technology, which is wasteful and means core systems do not speak to each other. Because data is land locked at force level, policing is unable to make the most of data analytics to understand its demand, its performance and its productivity.
To address these challenges we argue that the police need to get their data moving around more easily so they can enable interoperability; they need to make sure their senior leaders really understand the power of information and what is required to enable it; they need to shift away from such a high degree of spend on legacy systems by embracing open solutions in the cloud and doing more at scale; they need to speed up procurement processes so that new technology can be deployed more quickly throughout the service; and they need to be more imaginative about attracting the specialist skills they need.
Each of these things depends on the delivery of our core recommendation: the creation of a single enabling body responsible for police data and digital technology, from innovation to deployment. This means merging the plethora of existing organisations and programmes within a single national policing agency or headquarters. Its role would be wider than digital, data and technology, but these would be among its core functions.
This body would set a single strategy and be led by a fulltime national lead. It would have powers to set the common data standards that are so critical to enabling interoperability and policing’s ability to make the most of the AI revolution. It would host a test and assurance function to take promising innovations developed by local forces so they can be deployed at scale across the service. It would carry out national procurement where it makes sense to buy once rather than 43 times. It would be able to require forces to cooperate with such national programmes, although it would aim to work through consensus and by listening to the user base. In short such a body would be responsible for developing the technological and data infrastructure that will enable local forces to better address local people’s priorities around crime and public safety.
The good news is that none of this is impossible. With an increasingly supportive political environment, buy in from across the service and clear leadership, the police service can unleash the power of information.
Image: Marcus Spiske | Unsplash.com