South Wales Police and Gwent Police deploy NICE Investigate to centralise and integrate core policing systems

South Wales Police (Heddlu De Cymru) and Gwent Police (Heddlu Gwent Police) are two of four police forces in Wales. Serving 42 percent of the national population (1.3 million people), South Wales Police has over 3000 (Police workforce, England and Wales: 31 March 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)) police officers and over 2,200 police staff, including Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and a team of dedicated volunteers that includes over 200 Special Constables and around 200 Police Youth Volunteers.

Gwent Police has nearly 2,500 staff with a further 60 special officers volunteering. Together, the two forces cover more than 1,400 square miles of urban rural and coastal areas, encompassing five local authority areas of Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Monmouthshire, Newport and Torfaen, as well as two of the country’s largest cities – Swansea and the capital city, Cardiff.

The Challenge

Gwent Police and South Wales Police both recognised that they needed a solution to manage the abundance of digital material their officers and staff were having to deal with. A challenge compounded by a fragmented digital evidence landscape, as relevant material often resided in separate and unconnected applications that naturally lead to inefficiencies which were only going to get worse.

Inspector and Digital Services Division DEMS Project Lead at South Wales Police and Gwent Police, Bryn Glennie, states: “Rising volumes of digital evidence that are stored in siloes has the potential to create the perfect storm if nothing is done. It is for this reason we decided to look for a robust digital evidence management system.”

The Solution

The solution was NICE Investigate, a Digital Evidence Management System (DEMS) that is part of the NICE Evidencentral suite from NICE – a market-leader in public safety solutions – which is currently used by more than 20 police forces and organisations in England and Wales.

Gwent Police was the first of the two forces to go live, with both now having used NICE Investigate for over two years.

To date, South Wales Police has integrated its body worn video (BWV), ControlWorks, Niche RMS and its RedBox voice recorder, whilst Gwent Police has also added its BWV, Niche RMS, FotoWare, STORM and its digital interview recording systems.

The forces are also in the process of implementing a new command and control room solution that will include the deployment NICE Inform (NICE’s call logging software for mission critical Public Safety emergency communications’ environments), as well as the SAFE system, both of which will integrate with NICE Investigate.

During the implementation of NICE Investigate, South Wales Police also took the decision to switch its BWV supplier, which meant transitioning vast amounts of data. With over 30,000 video files being generated every month, South Wales Police had just over 1.2 million files within its incumbent system, equating to almost 500 terabytes of data.

“As we were integrating BWV into NICE Investigate, we decided we wanted to centralise the process and host the data with NICE, rather than another supplier,” explains Inspector Glennie.

The simple transfer of data alone took three months; however, a more significant challenge arose around the issue of shared evidence (the transfer of data and deletion of the system account would remove all the information from the criminal justice system).

“NICE’s support during this huge undertaking was phenomenal, going above and beyond, working alongside our team, the Crown Prosecution Service and British Transport Police to solve the problem,” comments Inspector Glennie, who benchmarked the impact of this initiative with a conservative cost saving of a quarter of a million pounds.

South Wales Police has since been approached by other forces looking to follow the same path, wanting to learn how they too can tackle the problem with a technical solution, rather that dedicating resources, round the clock, for a period of months to manually resolve the issue.

Today, if an officer wants to source data formerly held in the old BWV system they can quickly search, using a collar number, email address, or the URL link shared with the CPS, directly from NICE Investigate to retrieve and replay the footage.

As of Summer 2023, the entire workforce across both forces has permissions to use NICE Investigate, with approximately 3,900 staff actively using the system. However, the ability of citizens and business to be able to share digital material with the police is another major benefit of the system. This is particularly important as UK forces respond to addressing the rise in shoplifting.

The two forces are currently working on streamlining the process of sharing information with the CPS further by replacing the need to manually complete an MG0 form with a digital case file, created within NICE Investigate.

Today, NICE Investigate is the core system for police business and both South Wales Police and Gwent Police have dedicated a lot of time to ensure officers and staff are able to leverage the full range of features within the system.

Inspector Glennie concludes: “With NICE Investigate we have a single centralised DEMS that integrates with our current and future core policing systems, enabling our officers to see, sort and share information during their investigations.”

Looking to the future, South Wales Police and Gwent Police will be working with NICE to look at how they can take advantage of technologies such as live BWV streaming, enhanced redaction, the forces use of facial recognition and the potential of Artificial Intelligence to transform investigations, as part of the ongoing digital transformation of policing.