South Yorkshire Police strengthens community engagement, reduces costs and improves officer efficiency with NICE Investigate

South Yorkshire Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing South Yorkshire in England. South Yorkshire is a ceremonial and metropolitan county in England, with a population of approximately 1.34 million and a land area of 1,552 square kilometres. It is the southernmost county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region, consisting of four metropolitan boroughs, Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.

The Challenge

CCTV has been a crucial component of policing for many years. However, getting video footage for investigations has proven to be a laborious and time-consuming process for South Yorkshire Police and many other forces. When CCTV was required for an investigation, an officer would have to physically drive to the crime scene, canvas the area for relevant video footage, copy the video files onto physical media, and bring them back to the station. Upon reaching the station, officers often discovered that the videos were not even playable, requiring additional time for transcoding.

As the investigation progressed, the officer also had to manually log onto multiple systems to collect other essential digital evidence, further slowing down the investigation process. Faced with these digital evidence management challenges, South Yorkshire Police Force launched its Technology Enabled Change initiative to find a solution.

The Solution

South Yorkshire Police, along with neighbouring forces (Humberside Police, North Yorkshire Police, and West Yorkshire Police), initiated a competitive procurement process, and after lengthy vetting, selected NICE Investigate. Part of Evidencentral, NICE Investigate is a cloud-based Digital Evidence Management platform designed to help police forces in their quest to digitally transform investigations and evidence management.

Today, over 2,000 front-line officers, investigators, and control room personnel within South Yorkshire Police force rely on NICE Investigate to digitally transform their daily policing work.

Improving police-community collaboration & crime-solving

Getting footage into the hands of officers to solve crimes, when situations demand it, requires close collaboration among forces, communities, and businesses.

NICE Investigate’s Community Portal helps South Yorkshire Police achieve stronger community engagement. Officers can work collaboratively with businesses and community members to speed up the investigation and justice process through fast, effortless sharing of video and digital evidence.

In fact, businesses and citizens worldwide have used the NICE Investigate community portal to share over 1.7 million pieces of digital evidence, supporting hundreds of thousands of investigations.

How NICE Investigate’s Community Portal works

NICE Investigate’s Community portal allows local businesses and community members to voluntarily pre-register their cameras. This makes CCTV video much more easily accessible to South Yorkshire investigators when a crime happens.

Now, instead of having to travel huge distances to individual crime locations, officers can request and review videos right from their desks. The entire process of requesting and sharing CCTV video happens electronically. When a crime happens, investigators can view where nearby cameras are located, and instantly send out an electronic request for CCTV footage. Upon receiving the request, the business uploads the video through the portal. Uploaded videos are automatically transcoded to a playable format and immediately available for viewing.

The initiative has been enormously successful, with many retailers – small, large, and multinational – registering CCTV cameras. South Yorkshire Police has also encouraged local transport companies and councils to come onboard.

The success is in no small part due to the efforts of South Yorkshire community police officers, who have visited organisations across the region to explain the benefits of the programme, and in some cases, even use NICE Investigate’s mobile app to register some businesses on the spot.

“We have made good progress with the large shopping centres in Doncaster, Rotherham, and Sheffield, as well as local transport companies including buses, trains, and trams,” said John Yoxall, Detective Inspector with South Yorkshire Police. “Our local councils are also sharing CCTV with us via the NICE online portal daily. The next step is to onboard more small and independent businesses.”

With over 20 other police forces and organisations in the UK also leveraging the NICE Investigate portal, South Yorkshire Police can readily point to success in other regions when trying to bring local retailers on board. “When approaching a large national retailer, for example, we can bring to their attention how well the programme is working for stores in other regions,” said Yoxall. “This goes a long way toward instilling confidence and removing any concerns they may have.”

As more businesses sign on, the initiative is having a positive impact, starting with stronger engagement within the community.

“It’s a win-win all the way around,” said Yoxall. “It’s improved our community engagement. Our officers are able to obtain and review video faster, and they no longer have to travel long distances to pick up CCTV. The amount of time and money our force has saved not having to travel, and not having to supply discs and USB sticks, has been hugely beneficial.”

Yoxall also shared an example where faster access to video evidence made all the difference. One night, a Detective Sergeant working the night shift at the force’s headquarters in Sheffield was alerted to a firearms incident. He needed access to the CCTV video quickly. Without the aid of NICE Investigate, he might have needed to dispatch an officer to the location in Doncaster (more than 30km away). Thanks to modern technology, however, he was able to send out an electronic request for the video footage, which he received and reviewed in a span of 30 minutes.

“Every second counts during a major incident,” said Yoxall. “You need to get information to the right people as quickly as possible, whether that is an officer at the scene, the station, specialist departments, or the Crown Prosecution Service. This incident is just one example where a process that could potentially have taken many hours can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes.”

Beyond expediting CCTV collection, NICE Investigate streamlines the entire process of gathering digital evidence and building cases.

For example, instead of officers having to manually request or log into different systems to gather digital evidence, the solution provides one place for officers to perform all of their evidence collection and case-building work. It automatically collects digital evidence from integrated systems (for example, 999 and 101 calls, incident logs, recorded interviews) and organises it into electronic case folders. This saves investigators time and accelerates the case-building process. Investigators can also electronically share digital case files with the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS).