Innovation in policing: Enhancing operations with analytics

The innovation landscape across the UK’s police forces is rapidly evolving. There are a huge range of digital transformation programmes underway, all geared towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of police operations.

One key focus across these programmes is the use of data analytics. The Office of the Police Chief Scientific Advisor (OPCSA) defines analytics as “the ability to synthesise information to draw insights that can lead to actionable decisions, often in combination with other information and at scale.”

This definition is similar to commercial approaches. However, enabling ‘actionable decisions’ takes on unique importance within the context of policing, where effective data exploitation can directly lead to crime prevention and enhanced public safety.

As we see so often in news coverage, these decisions can mean life or death in some circumstances and so are quite rightly open to high levels of scrutiny. With that in mind, it is vital that decision makers have access to the best information in a timely manner, in order to take action.

Capitalising on data

Over recent years, data analytics has become increasingly critical to police operations across the UK and abroad. This is supported in the National Policing Digital Strategy 2020-2030, which highlights the need to ensure that digital adoption is expanding the availability of data. It’s therefore unsurprising to see a significant focus on analytics compared to other service lines across the innovation landscape in policing.

This demonstrates the positive intent in policing to be more data led, and fits more broadly with two further national strategies that seek to ensure that Policing in England and Wales will be enabled through the use of better science and technology:

• Strategic Objective 4 in the NPCC Strategic Plan (2021-2025), which empowers policing to “collaborate with partners to deliver transformative innovation and new technologies that improve all aspects of policing”.
• The Policing Vision 2025, which focuses more on how the service will aim to “make better use of digital intelligence and evidence and transfer all material in a digital format to the criminal justice system”.

However the focus on analytics also points to the challenges that forces face in terms of the scale and complexity of their data. Forces collect significant amounts of data, but to utilise it effectively requires innovative solutions by which to store, handle, manage and analyse it.

Compressed budgets and funding can often restrict the amount and level of innovation taking place and can therefore make this data analytics, insights and exploitation more difficult. However, important funding streams, such as the STAR Fund from the OPCSA, are providing greater means and routes for forces to explore and test these new analytical innovations.

Practical applications

When looking at digital innovation case studies within UK police, it’s clear that analytics has applications across many different themes and areas. It enables the reduction of crime, saves force and officer time, empowers better and more strategic decision making, provides means for better preventative measures to be implemented, and facilitates improved force response.

One clear common thread throughout is the ability to deliver timely, actionable insights from analytical capabilities. As a result, there is a realisation of better policing outcomes. Forces make better strategic decisions and more focused interventions when there is a comprehensive understanding of their data, ultimately providing more effective and positive impacts.

For example, one police force developed a tool that provides intelligence insights and assessments of potential domestic abuse threats. These insights provide the basis for interventions and management plans for domestic abuse perpetrators, and have seen some perpetrators reduce their offenses by 100% in six months.

Similarly, another force implemented an online insights tool that pulled data from core policing systems into various intuitive dashboards accessible to Officers to exploit as required. A victim contact dashboard within the tool led to a reduction in missed victim contact from 18% to just 5%, providing better results for the public and for victims specifically – a huge focus for forces across England and Wales.

Of course, this is all only possible with efficient data management. Whether we’re talking about victim contact, domestic abuse, knife crime, or any other aspect of policing, data can’t be adequately exploited if it isn’t first managed in the right way. This highlights the need to connect citizen interactions and operational information across departments and forces, ensuring that the right information is in the right place to be accessed and leveraged by those who need it.

A case study in analytics

Essex Police was successful in an application for funding to improve its ability to deal with violence against women and girls, with a specific focus on domestic abuse. After carrying out a two-year review of its approach to identifying dangerous perpetrators following the tragic death of Ashley Wadsworth in 2022, Essex Police partnered with Essex University to develop a methodology that would identify high-risk abuse perpetrators and enable early intervention to help protect potential future victims.

Codenamed Operation Puffin, the force developed an entirely new approach that provided better data insights into potentially dangerous offenders. But, despite best efforts, it hit a barrier in terms of the finite capacity of its staff to undertake this complex, multi- layered assessment. It could take two people up to a week to review all the available information for one lead, or perpetrator, before action could be taken.

This is where ILAS, our Intelligence Lead Assessment Service, allowed the force to take the next step. ILAS is a branch of AI that uses inference and reasoning to replicate and operationalise expert human tradecraft. By taking the Operation Puffin methodology, we worked with Essex Police to identify the precursor indicators and behaviours that would identify threat and risk in the domestic abuse domain.

The system then automated the work of analysts, applying confidence scoring and risk modelling in the same way that a person would. This resulted in a prioritised threat list that not only showed the people and relationships of most concern, but also those that had the potential to get worse. What would have taken two people up to a week can now be achieved at the click of a button, allowing expert practitioners to spend more time taking action and less time on manual research.

Detective Superintendent Matt Cornish, Domestic Violence Lead for Essex Police, said: “The big thing for me is the system being able to use inference and reasoning to take the cohort to the next level.  We were struggling because of the complexity of weightings, which was a huge barrier preventing us from moving forward. We knew what we wanted to do, but lacked the necessary IT system/experience to make it achievable.

“As well as examining the risk posed by the perpetrator, the system allows us to consider any additional risk, or potential mitigations within their current relationship, which hasn’t been achieved before. Finally, this is the truly preventative step: highlighting perpetrators with risk indicators (to allow for intervention and victim safeguarding) before they commit the serious offences that would put them into current cohorts.

“The time saving aspect is a positive factor, but in some ways this is a secondary ‘bonus’ with the real benefit being the ability to assess risk at machine speed to allow for early targeted intervention, and ultimately prevent serious harm. This to me demonstrates the power that can be achieved in police and tech collaborations.”

Turning inference into action

We’ve spent a lot of time as a company thinking about how to help police forces make better use of their data. This thinking – combined with our domain expertise – has led to the creation of ILAS, which helps Officers and law enforcement analysts make sense of vast quantities of data to determine what’s happening in the real world.

The tool, by inferring links between different data sets and points, gives police forces the information required to protect those who need it most. ILAS is currently deployed in an increasing number of police forces, and has been configured for domains as diverse as knife crime, child exploitation, firearms licensing and countering the criminal use of drones. Plans for 2024 include the development of a RASSO rape and serious sexual offences domain, together with the management of sexual and violent offenders and organised criminality.