Technology and equipment

OPINION: Despite growing momentum across society for the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), policing – like many other sectors – is proving to be big on ambition but slow on adoption of the new technology; Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, explores the reasons behind the slow adoption, the challenges around public trust and confidence, and how the successful introduction of AI into critical healthcare communications could provide lessons for policing.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: Facial recognition has become an essential technology for law enforcement and government agencies. Retrospective facial recognition system is an ideal tool for this fast-paced world, because it helps officers to identify suspects in a fraction of the time.

OPINION: As the first digital natives of AI-fluent Generations Alpha and Beta come of age, law enforcement agencies and policymakers will face an unprecedented criminal landscape shaped by tech tools, hyper-personalized algorithms, and borderless digital worlds; Cognyte’s Yakir Bitterman, a Webint Product Owner and open-source intelligence specialist, explores the behavioral trends among digital natives, and looks ahead at the changing and challenging misinformation threat landscape that awaits them.

FEATURE: An update on Police Scotland’s Policing Together programme, launched in 2021 to deliver “long-term tangible impact” on a wide variety of equality and diversity issues, reveals improvements on a range of inclusivity and community representation measures, higher levels of satisfaction with police-public interactions, and reduction in the use of force, officer injuries and complaints, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: Policing and artificial intelligence (AI) experts from the UK, Australia, US, Canada and the UAE came together recently to explore international insights into policing in the age of AI, highlighting the challenges around improving tech capability, overcoming fragmentation, the need to engage and explain to the public and police staff, and the dangers of eroding police discretion, as well as the increasing threats from the criminal use of AI, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at the worrying rise of the 764 online network, which targets teenagers and promotes involvement in a range of damaging activities including abuse and exploitation, satanic and neo-Nazi extremism, and online and offline violence, and the efforts to tackle the growth of the network.

OPINION: This week saw the launch of the United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign, with a focus on tackling the digital and online abuse of women and girls; the University of Leicester’s Dr Sarah Jane Fox, Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Culture, explores the messages behind the UNiTE campaign, what it is hoping to achieve, and the parallels between offline and online misogyny and abuse.

INTERVIEW: Since Krissy Barrett’s appointment last month as Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), she has been setting out some of the challenges facing the organisation in the current policing landscape; she recently spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about her aims for leading the force to meet the evolving threats, the AFP’s unique technical and collaborative capabilities, and her ambition to ensure the AFP is “the best police agency in the world to work in”.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already starting to transform policing and other emergency services. Jamie Wilson of NiCE explains how the true benefits of AI lie in extracting valuable insights from data. A notable example of this is in emergency communications centres.

INTERVIEW: Developed by an academic team at the University of Sheffield, the Sexual Trafficking Identification Matrix (STIM) assesses adverts on adult service websites and analyses factors such as the photographs, language and details used to help law enforcement identify victims and perpetrators of human trafficking or sexual exploitation, as Dr Xavier L’Hoiry explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

FEATURE: The latest review from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns that the “opaque” nature of computer technology is leaving both state and organisational systems vulnerable to cyber-attack; the review also set out the steps that organisations can take to increase system transparency and reduce risks, as well as highlighting the range of initiatives the NCSC is currently delivering to improve resilience and target cybercriminals, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: Policing is looking to technology to establish new channels for public contact, but the impact on public-police encounters has until now been little studied; a three-year research project by SIPR Director Professor Liz Aston, Senior Criminology Lecturer Dr Helen Wells, Criminology Lecturer Dr Estelle Clayton, UCL Professor Ben Bradford, and Criminology Professor Megan O’Neill, has highlighted valuable learning on a range of issues including accessibility, the importance of human interaction, and confidence in policing.

OPINION: Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in policing – both in tackling crime and improving efficiency – with suggestions that it could also be key to improving public trust and confidence; but Leeds Trinity University Associate Professor Jonathan Jackson and PCDA Programme Lead Katie Oxley argue that while AI may offer valuable advantages, public trust and confidence also depend on the quality of interaction with individual officers, so ‘street craft’ and communication skills remain crucial.

INTERVIEW: With retail crime reaching “unprecedented levels”, Superintendent Lisa Maslen, the lead of the National Business Crime Centre, is looking to build a repository of best practice and urging forces to “borrow with pride” in an effort to tackle offending that is “organised, prolific and impactive on us all”, as she explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

OPINION: Following the announcement by UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week of the abolition of police and crime commissioners as a “failed experiment”, Ron Winch, Associate Professor in Policing at Birmingham City University, considers whether this current decision could indicate a more radical reform agenda to be unveiled in the forthcoming policing white paper, including the replacement of the 43-force model with the introduction of ‘mega-forces’.

OPINION: Police forces globally face continuing modernisation challenges – with technology a key element in driving change – but the employee experience is often neglected in the transformation process; Phillip Bland, Global Government Advisor at experience management specialists Qualtrics, sets out how forces can ensure the frontline employee voice is heard, measured and acted upon in the police modernisation process.

FEATURE: With the frequency and severity of wildfires increasing across Europe, a series of innovative new projects has been launched to strengthen wildfire management and readiness, offering valuable guidance to fire services, other first responders, and police and fire commissioners alike, as Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth reports.

OPINION: In the latest in a regular series of articles from the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), Bedfordshire PCC John Tizard, the APCC’s Joint Lead on Performance, Data and New Tech Ethics, looks at the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and technology in policing, and highlights the steps he has taken in his own force around accountability and governance, which could help achieve the APCC’s aim of a roadmap towards a strong ethical governance framework with PCCs at the centre.

FEATURE: The recent Building Bridges evidence-based policing conference in Ontario showcased efforts by policing to correct the mismatch between how crime is experienced and how it is measured, with a harm-focused framework pioneered by Barrie Police Service and London Police Service’s new gamification approach to hot-sport policing leading the way, as Policing Insight’s Matthew Wood reports.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: Today’s law enforcement leaders are pressured to do more with less – all while managing new waves of crime, volumes of complex data and growing demands for public transparency. That’s why departments across the globe are turning to evidence-based policing powered by data and AI, to improve decision making, build trust and work more efficiently.

OPINION: Former West Midlands Sergeant Phil Cleary, co-founder of SmartWater and now a published novelist, shares one officer’s account of how underfunded services, not indifference, may have shaped the failures around the UK child grooming scandal that are now widely condemned, explores what could have been done differently, and suggests steps the current Government could take to reset the child protection and safeguarding response.

INTERVIEW: This week’s National Audit Office (NAO) report into police productivity in England and Wales highlights a range of barriers to forces improving productivity, the dangers of the current fragmented policing structure, and the risks of a short-term funding approach to long-term service delivery; Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to NAO Report Director Oliver Lodge about the implications of the findings, and what forces and the Home Office can do to improve productivity and efficiency.

INTERVIEW: The Hellenic Police is a partner in the NOTIONES project, a European network bringing police agencies together to improve the capacity and capability of intelligence functions; Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth spoke to Anthoula Bania and Christos Floros, Lieutenant Colonels in the Hellenic Police, about their work with the NOTIONES network, and the benefits of participating in European security research and innovation projects.

FEATURE: In the first in a new series of The Police Student focusing on Community and Neighbourhood Policing, Policing Insight Academic Editor Dr Carina O’Reilly explores the development and definition of neighbourhood policing, and considers its importance in building relationships with the community, as well as its role in tackling public concerns about crime and strengthening confidence in policing.