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Modernising the police
Robert Leach, Client Partner – Police, BT Global Services UK, writes on the difficult future faced by the UK Police Service and the role of IT in taking on this challenge.
With public sector cuts looming large, it is clear the UK Police Service faces a difficult future. Headlines about an expected slump in numbers of police officers slump are accompanied by government promises that police forces will be required to maintain and improve public confidence and ensure public safety, alongside talk of transforming and modernising policing.
Amidst these cuts, the police force is expected to maintain operational standards, find new ways of working both individually, and in partnership with each other, comply with challenging new national standards for IT and information management via ISIS, higher levels of information security – and more.
Modernising the police force in this way, and creating efficiency and cost savings is no mean feat, but technology can go a long way to helping with the daunting task. Using new technologies is not a sticking plaster, it can revolutionise the way police forces work.
Talk of community policing rather predictably focuses on maintaining a visible police presence but it is more than this. Community policing relies upon on building trust with local communities, and being able to share information readily. Done well, it increases confidence in policing. To create more effective community policing, being able to access, store and exchange this information is vital and this is where technology can play a real role.
Police forces are now making use of mobile devices and mobile police applications. There are now about 40,000 BlackBerrys and PDAs in use by officers across England & Wales. Their use has already been proven to improve productivity and efficiency gains. In addition, body worn video and direct feeds from CCTV are becoming more popular to help officers react more quickly and stay in touch with national and local resources. Sadly, the use of these new technologies is fairly inconsistent across the UK, and in some places the back office systems mean these devices don’t deliver what they could.
Integration is important. Using technology to modernise technology doesn’t just mean buying and issuing devices, but integrating them into complex back office systems. It is also about making the devices relevant to the officers who are using them, not over-complicating things simply because the device has the latest whizzy techno capability. When done well, mobile devices, with easy to use applications which are relevant to the officer, and which support the process of Policing because they are well integrated to the back office, do deliver efficiencies. Some forces really are seeing the benefit, with North Wales Police as just one example, achieving externally audited savings of around 14% of officers’ time with their mobile data implementation.
There are also opportunities to take things much further here. The technology is there already, in the hands of the general public. It could enable a photo taken on a smart-phone to be immediately shared with the Police. A system that could readily accept an image sent by a member of the public and which is then shared with a local community team would take modernisation one step further.
When faced with the need to modernise and cut costs, the police service can learn from a private sector approach. For example, a commercial organisation would seize the opportunity that the absolute necessity of change brings. They would be faced with little choice. The first thing they would have to do is analyse and assess the way they do business, see what and where processes need to change to reduce wastage, remove costs, create efficiencies. Or perhaps look at where new processes are required in order to deliver the fundamental transformation that is needed in order to maintain business survival. They then have to make sure that the whole of the new or revised business processes are implemented alongside the people change programme, organisational changes, training and so on - to optimise their business to operate in the new, financially challenging environment.
In this context, it is inconceivable that technology would be used for anything other then to enable the transformation – IT cannot be considered any longer simply to be an infrastructural support tool. It is an inherent part of the effectiveness – even the survival - of the business.
So the approach to IT in the police service needs to stop reconfiguring technology based on what has always been done, but rather to focus on using technology to improve and enable the effectiveness of policing. Technology should be viewed as an enabler – too often IT is actually a constraint to progress. This is mostly by virtue of the piecemeal way that technology has been applied in the past. For example, the plethora of different databases that hold information relating to an individual or incident makes it - at the very least - a challenge to find relevant data - and at the same time sure that you have all that is available, that nothing is missing. Persisting in using technology to react, to implement piecemeal solutions, really hampers the potential for IT to be the enabler of the future that it needs to be.
Data management is key to the process. All forces currently have their own individual “libraries” of information – in many cases data held in different databases across multiple systems, with these systems often spread across many sites. Doing this requires hardware, software, heating, cooling, management, admin, people for each system, and at each site. The increasing prevalence of data from digital sources being required to be stored and accessed within the policing process only makes the challenge greater – i.e. systems need to be larger, the admin and other overheads is ever increasing, as is the cost.
It is one thing for an individual force to consolidate all of its data into a more efficient and less costly structure. It is another for one Force to consider sharing its capability with another Force – and as we all know this is increasingly being looked at across the country. This latter approach will lead to economies of scale, which is great. But there is so much more that can be done with all the information Forces hold, particularly if the UK police service takes advantage of virtualisation, linking multi-site databases to provide a cheap and flexible solution to data storage. Of course, sharing in this way on entrusting third parties with data, means security is paramount.
Community policing is not currently being as well served by technology as it could be. I know others think the same. Currently IT supports community policing, when it could be enabling it. The right technology can make Policing more efficient and less costly but still maintain the focus on serving the citizen the way he or she wants to be served, and which continues to put the bad people in front of the courts – in future more rapidly and more reliably - to determine their fate.
In other words, IT can and should be leveraged and used to reinforce the fact that British policing, already the best on the world, continues to improve, and that Policing delivers to our all our citizen and communities, that good, old fashioned service they all desire.
