Virtually all industries have undergone, or are currently undergoing, some kind of digital transformation. Although perhaps not the first industry you might think of in the context of digitalisation, policing is no different.
It’s widely recognised by senior leaders across UK police forces that innovation in science and technology is critical. As such, digital innovation in UK policing is extremely varied, focusing on and aiming to tackle a large number of different areas. All of this is undertaken with the goal of enabling forces across the country to increase both efficiency and effectiveness when preventing crime and protecting the public.
In fact, the Office of the Police Chief Scientific Advisor’s (OPCSA) Science and Technology Strategy uses seven ‘Service Lines’ to categorise this innovation across policing. These are: Analytics, Crime Prevention, Personal Safety, Mobility, Identification & Tracing, Surveillance & Sensing, and Interconnectivity.
Throughout this blog series, we’ll provide insights into some of the innovation taking place across forces in England and Wales and delve into examples of the work being delivered in specific Service Lines, starting with Analytics and Crime Prevention. Before this, however, it’s important to provide context to the UK policing innovation landscape.
Pillars of police transformation
Today, virtually every crime has some kind of digital element. Not only is technology becoming more ingrained across society, but criminals are also using technology themselves to evade detection. As such, police forces are under pressure to use digital tools in new ways and leverage modern ways of working.
Current innovation in policing covers a wide range of tactical and strategic themes – from improving overall response and enhancing capability to saving time and enabling data insights across all fronts. Along with front-line policing outcomes like crime reduction, there are also many less obvious areas more associated with the ‘back-office’, such as professional standards and data management. Indeed, to help upskill across the forces, the NPCC Data and Analytics Board has recently released a series around data awareness, covering areas such as governance, quality and architecture.
Outside of these, we’ve seen one particular theme stand above the rest: improving process efficiency. The clearest example regularly seen across UK police forces is the use of robotic process automation (RPA), something that is becoming more critical as forces collect larger amounts of data.
A number of forces have delivered exemplar methods of RPA across their organisation. For example, one force implemented a tool that speeds up crime data input and delivers analytical reporting, ultimately saving the force over 200 hours a day by removing manual processing. Similarly, another force delivered an RPA solution across its incident management unit that enabled the clearing of a significant backlog, saving over 68 weeks of anticipated human effort.
Being able to automate the handling, processing and analysis of data is critical to force efficiency and effectiveness, freeing officers up from time-consuming manual tasks to focus their efforts on preventing crime. Given forces are often stretched for time and capacity, implementing as many time-saving innovations as possible – particularly those that can be easily replicated across forces – will help reduce this burden and demand on policing.
Further, time savings inevitably lead to cost savings, which is critical given the compressed budgets facing many police forces. Simple money-saving innovations will free up much needed funds to re-direct towards more critical policing requirements, while demonstrating the value of digital transformation to other forces. One force, for example, has implemented a simple chat bot on the force’s homepage website that has delivered an annual saving of over £130,000 by removing laborious police staff time. Small differences such as this can create massive benefits for forces in the long-run.
Bumps in the road
Of course, there are a large number of challenges and blockers that can impact the ultimate success of innovation in UK police forces. For example, it can often become siloed rather than integrated, thereby reducing its impact in connecting to the wider force. What’s more, the ability to transfer and rollout an innovation across multiple forces may reduce further modernisation, as there are a wide variety of systems and platforms that forces utilise – and providing access to all relevant individuals often becomes difficult to deliver at scale.
This underlines the importance of driving collaboration, coherency and strategic alignment across forces – at both local and national levels in order to maximise the value that can be delivered. There must be a focus on understanding how to scale relevant innovation beyond an individual force, which will help ensure that innovations align to wider strategic aims while providing opportunities for integration and data sharing – highlighting important roles for the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), Police Digital Service (PDS) and the College of Policing (CoP).
Culture can also be a blocker. Issues such as scepticism of technology from business or operational leaders can hinder initiatives, particularly if those leaders aren’t used to thinking in a digital-first way. Other challenges include meeting stringent governance requirements, finding subject matter expertise, and securing the resources required to adequately test and then roll out digital transformation projects.
Looking forwards, understanding these blockers and challenges will be critical to reducing their impact or removing them entirely prior to the development and deployment of future digital innovation programmes.
Key considerations
Finally, our work with UK police has helped us identify several considerations that can contribute to the effectiveness of innovation in the sector. I’d like to highlight two specifically. The first is the importance of partnerships. As in many industries, working in partnership can be extremely valuable, allowing forces to take a holistic view of the innovation activity while planning and developing strategic goals.
Sharing the responsibility for delivery generally increases the chances of success, as forces can maximise the value of funding and allocation of resources. Not only can greater collaboration result in faster delivery, but also improved quality. And this doesn’t just mean partnerships with other forces. Partnering with suppliers and academia is also critical to meeting broader strategic objectives. Our work with several different law enforcement organisations as part of the Home Office Insight Centre has helped to demonstrate this in a number of different technologies, platforms and systems.
The second key consideration is return on investment (ROI), which has a key role of play in maintaining momentum behind digital transformations. Forces must be able to prove and evidence that their innovation projects generate positive outcomes – whether around preventing crime, enhancing process, or any other measure of success.
Those forces that demonstrate ROI will be more likely to secure future funding, while at the same time providing examples of best practice that can be shared with other forces to enable continued innovation excellence across the full spectrum of UK policing – to the benefit of police and society at large.
However, forces need to ensure they reserve financial and resource capacity to enable the capture of these benefits, to adequately track and demonstrate the return on investment for future business cases – particularly as many forces operate on short-term contracts that tend to be reviewed and renewed on an annual basis.