Innovation

INNOVATION: An internally focused Behavioural Science Unit set up by Thames Valley Police is helping the force to address a range of issues including leadership standards, neurodiversity, and structural and geographical change – and good practice identified from the work of the Unit could soon be shared with other forces across England and Wales, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: Dyfed-Powys Police has become the latest force to implement an Evidence-Based Investigation Tool that uses algorithms to forecast which crimes are more likely to be solved as well as those for which further investigation is unlikely to yield a result – enabling forces to focus their resources more effectively, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A partnership with the Leeds-based Domestic Violence and Abuse Voices Project providing “humbling, compelling and motivating” first-hand accounts of how women have been treated by police in the past is helping officers in West Yorkshire to gain greater insights and improve the service they deliver in domestic abuse cases, while giving victim-survivors a “life-changing” opportunity to vocalise their experiences and feel heard, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: As the Data (Use and Access) Bill makes its way through the UK Parliament, Canterbury Christ Church University Senior Lecturer in Policing, Dr David Lydon, looks at the potential implications of the new legislation on the use of automated decision-making in policing, and the opportunities and challenges it could present for police forces as well as the need to ensure safeguards for the public.

INNOVATION: A portal developed in Humberside that allows victims to contact officers in charge of their case for updates rather than tie-up call handlers on force phone lines is also helping to provide a better service, according to those behind the plan; Ian Weinfass spoke to Humberside Police’s Scot Dunn and senior responsible officer for the NPCC’s digital public contact programme, DCC Simon Megicks, about the award-winning initiative.

FEATURE: A new CCTV system introduced by Cumbria Constabulary, which uses artificial intelligence analytics to search both stored and real-time footage to identify missing persons and suspect individuals and vehicles, is saving the force thousands of hours as well as improving outcomes, and could soon be accessible to officers out on patrol via mobile phones and laptops, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: In the last in a series of five articles looking at the big debates in police use of facial recognition (FR), extracted from this year’s ‘Facing the future: The rise of facial recognition in policing’ report, Policing Insight’s James Sweetland explores the remarkable global variations in the legal and regulatory frameworks governing FR use, and whether a more effective approach can balance the obvious risks against the potential benefits to secure the best possible outcomes for public safety.

FEATURE: A 27-year-old paedophile was creating cartoonish pseudo child abuse images and distributing them among an online network; Detective Chief Inspector Jen Tattersall from Greater Manchester Police’s online child abuse investigations team tells Ian Weinfass how the force managed to bring a case against the offender, and safeguard real children at risk.

ANALYSIS: An evaluation of a successful street outreach programme – pioneered by Leicestershire Police, but using community outreach staff rather than uniformed officers – has highlighted a significant drop in both the frequency and severity of offences in several city centre crime hotspot areas, as well as considerable financial savings, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: With police officers encountering digital evidence in the vast majority of inquiries, a digital evidence strategy (DES) can ensure they are prepared to effectively deal with it; Dr Graeme Horsman, Senior Lecturer in Digital Forensics at Cranfield University, explains how the GAMEPLANS acrostic can help officers produce a robust DES to effectively identify, collect, examine, and evaluate any digital devices/data, and define the circumstances when it is appropriate to conduct such tasks.

INNOVATION: A new police digital academy providing officers from five forces in north-west England with easily accessible short sessions on retrieving evidence and digital safeguarding in domestic abuse cases looks set to expand to cover other crimes and be made available to other forces, after feedback from the initial programme highlighted improvements around understanding and awareness among officers, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: The use of out-of-court resolutions (OoCRs) by police forces in England and Wales is inconsistent, but some forces have recorded significant reductions in investigation times and improvements in outcomes; with costs sometimes viewed as a problem, police and technology advisor Paul Kennedy, and Josh Hartlage, founder of tech company AdventFS, explore the ‘offender pays’ OoCR model which could offer a viable solution.

FEATURE: At this year’s APCC-NPCC Partnership Summit, where science and tech issues were once again high on the agenda, City of London Police Commissioner Pete O’Doherty argued for policing to become more offensive in its efforts to ensure cyber security; senior leaders also made the case for a stronger national approach to tech, and a survivor of deepfake abuse described how the police response to her crime left her “completely broken”, as Policing Insight’s James Sweetland reports.

ANALYSIS: In the fourth in a series of five articles looking at the big debates in police use of facial recognition (FR), extracted from this year’s ‘Facing the future: The rise of facial recognition in policing’ report, Policing Insight’s James Sweetland explores the crucial issue of privacy and intrusion – which goes to the very heart of the FR debate – and looks at the absence of legislation around FR, with much of the early oversight coming from privacy regulators.

INNOVATION: There is much debate about the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in surveillance (both in policing and other sectors), and the public’s response to that deployment; researcher, lecturer, and Sheffield Hallam University PhD candidate Yasmine Ezzeddine argues that latest research suggests the public are already adapting to the growing use of AI – and rather than saying “no”, are urging for “not so fast”.

INNOVATION: Tobias Stenström, Head of Camera Surveillance, Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Analytics for the Swedish Police Authority’s West Region, believes that data-driven policing “requires a different type of leadership” that “might be out of many bosses’ comfort zones”; speaking at a recent conference he also revealed how Swedish police are exploiting AI tools like ChatGPT and object recognition tech, as Policing Insight’s James Sweetland reports.

INNOVATION: With domestic abuse (DA) now recognised as a policing priority for UK forces, a new approach to tackling the issue has been launched by Dyfed Powys Police, with neighbourhood policing teams adopting the 4Ps model (prepare, protect, prevent, pursue) usually associated with terrorism and organised crime to provide an improved service to medium-risk DA victims and target offenders more effectively, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: Academics from two Canadian universities have raised concerns about the country’s law enforcement use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, claiming that police bodies aren’t transparent enough when procuring new tech, and that failing to make policing subject to new AI legislation could undermine justice in Canada in the future, as Policing Insight’s James Sweetland reports.

INNOVATION: Many police forces around the world are facing new and ever-changing challenges – both in the ‘real world’ and online – and efforts to implement community policing approaches face an increasingly complex landscape; Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at a new European Commission initiative to help police and other agencies meet those challenges, leveraging social sciences methodologies as well as the latest technology.

INTERVIEW: Alex Finn, the National Police Chiefs’ Council digital youth engagement lead, spoke to Policing Insight’s Ian Weinfass about a UK project to engage young people on social media, and why he thinks it should be rolled out further.

INNOVATION: Immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality are increasingly important in society, as well as transforming how police forces train, adapt, and respond to challenges; Wrexham University Professional Policing Lecturer Darren Jacks – a former police officer with 30 years of experience – believes higher education institutions have a vital role to play in partnering with police to leverage the maximum benefits from these new technologies.

FEATURE: A new Queensland Police Service (QPS) approach to responding to volume crimes which focuses on attendance by scenes of crime officers has seen an increase in evidence obtained from the scene while saving more than 180,000 hours for general duties officers, as QPS Senior Sergeants Lisa Weller and Josh White explained to delegates at the recent Global Evidence-Based Policing Conference.

INNOVATION: With artificial intelligence (AI) advances hailed widely as a huge opportunity for law enforcement, police now face the challenge of identifying effective AI systems from those that don’t do the job; University of Cambridge PhD candidate Jacob John Verrey, and Chief Inspector Lewis Lincoln-Gordon of the National Police Chiefs’ Council AI Portfolio, argue that adapting and implementing the ‘snake oil filter’ approach used in medicine could offer policing an efficient process for assessing and deploying the right technology.

FEATURE: After a 12-month pilot which saw more than 100 high-risk missing persons and lost bush walkers located and brought to safety, New South Wales Police is rolling out its BluLink web-based media platform across the force, with the aim of using capabilities such as GPS location services, live streaming, evidence uploads and chat functions to enable officers to work smarter rather than harder, as Policing Insight’s Keith Potter reports.