Vigilant Research’s Digital Policing Review Capability Assessment 2017 considered what police technology chiefs told us about their challenges, their ambitions and their plans. We gave forces credit for having determined when and how they would develop a capability, even when implementation was some way in the future. We said that police ICT departments with a detailed roadmap had “strategic confidence”, and examined the structures and capabilities which underpinned it.
In a larger force, the responsibility for technology horizon scanning can be devolved to a trusted lieutenant, or outsourced to a friendly systems integrator. Smaller forces may not have this option.
But how does a force ensure that these long-term plans are regularly challenged against the prospect of new, disruptive technologies? It takes a lot for a police ICT manager to be more than a firefighter, and to emerge as a strategic leader in their force. Perhaps it’s a tall order to be a futurist into the bargain. In a larger force, the responsibility for technology horizon scanning can be devolved to a trusted lieutenant, or outsourced to a friendly systems integrator. Smaller forces may not have this option.
Over the next year, the Digital Policing Review will be carrying out three discrete research exercises into issues suggested by the service, findings from which will be published on Policing Insight. The first of these is a comprehensive review of how the technology futures function is resourced and managed in UK policing. Research is already underway, and if this topic interests you, please get in touch. Of course, we will be talking to ICT leaders across UK policing. We’ll also be engaging with the police horizon scanning community and other strategic thinkers answerable to chief officers, tasked with considering new ways to protect the public and emerging vectors of threat and risk. OPCCs should be closely involved in holding the technology strategy to account, and we look forward to talking with them.
Does policing need to spend scarce resources on predicting a technology landscape where it is has tended to lag?
Our focus on the operational aspect of the futures function brings some serious questions into play. One is how far ahead of mainstream enterprise ICT a police CIO needs to think. The service now accepts cloud services to an extent that would have been surprising a couple of years ago. The Oracle-based PND’s replacement uses non-relational open-source Hadoop and agile development. Many policing applications are optimised for mobile devices. All very laudable, but it’s been a decade since investment decisions like these were avant-garde. Does policing need to spend scarce resources on predicting a technology landscape where it is has tended to lag? An effective technology futures function would certainly need to be able to distinguish between spaces where policing can reliably follow trends in enterprise ICT, and those where the service’s needs may outpace those of its peers.
Many, but not all, of the latter will be those double-edged issues where innovation presents both threats and opportunities. Autonomous vehicles challenge our conceptions of roads policing, and drones could be a vector of multiple threats; meanwhile unmanned assets could also routinely attend future incidents in place of officers, and any force making a long-term command & control platform investment needs to consider all the consequences. Similarly, machine learning and artificial intelligence could transform cyber criminality or mundane policing business processes alike. So we’ll be examining the pros and cons of adopting a joined-up approach to technology scanning across the service’s needs and future threats.
We’ll also consider at which point a concern should move from the technology futures realm to the here and now. This question is particularly tough when the terminology is broad, as with IoT –sensors present opportunities of varying plausibility and importance, from wellbeing-monitoring wearables through to forensics exploitation of smart appliances. There’s a parallel issue of how to treat distant but highly threatening scenarios, such as quantum cryptography ending the encryption and decryption arms race. And because the fundamental concern is how the police technology futures capability should be resourced and tasked, we will look at what role national bodies and collaboration might play.
To find about more about this report, and for a copy of the detailed research objectives, contact us at info@vigilantresearch.
Thoughts and emailed contributions are very welcome, but ideally we’d like to set up a short telephone interview to cover some specific questions. All findings are anonymised and the report will only be circulated within the policing community.
If you haven’t yet read the Digital Policing Review Capability Assessment 2017, published earlier this year, then please request it here.
