Is police IT really a “complete and utter mess”? How can the UK police force avoid irrelevancy and provide much-need improvement to their information technology and processes?
The recent report from the Home Affairs Select Committee on the future of the police force painted a dire picture. One of the starkest quotes was around the UK police forces’ investment in and adoption of new technology, which was described as “quite frankly, a complete and utter mess.”
The report suggests that police forces could be facing “irrelevancy” if they continue as they are, unable to implement new technology and communications solutions at an agile pace. A compounding factor seemed to be, as Martyn Underhill put it, that policing continued to be “hamstrung” by “numerous different solutions to the same problem being generated across different forces.” Which not only complicates matters but also adds immense extra costs when duplicating reform programmes.
The size, scope and complexity of IT systems combined with the need to treat each force differently makes it nigh on impossible to implement a national IT strategy for the police. The net result is unnecessary extra costs for every police force across the country, poor communication between forces and little-to-no interoperability between any of their IT systems.
Having worked with many different police forces in my capacity as CEO of Coeus Software, I have quite broad experience in the ways in which the disparate and often outdated IT methods the police force use can be quite a hindrance in their duties.
One of the biggest technology challenges facing the police is the disjointed nature of the programmes and processes used to collect the data they need, both within their organisation and when dealing with external processes – the police, courts, probation services, social services all use different systems. At a practical level, I hear every day from officers who are exasperated by the sheer quantity of different databases and systems they need just to complete the simplest of tasks, such as searching intelligence and criminal records and then having to assimilate the information quickly, all with different login details.
Simplifying police IT should be a priority for the Home Office, but in the meantime there are solutions for police departments to make their technological processes more coherent and less disparate. Leveraging cloud-based IT like Microsoft Azure hosted services or mobile apps can save a lot of police hours.
PoliceBox is just one example of a cloud-based service which can be deployed quickly to deliver cost-savings to a force, specifically designed to combat the disjointed IT challenge. Via a single app on their smartphone, it allows Officers to get paperwork done, digitally, while in or out of the office. Most importantly for officers, it provides a means by which disparate systems can be researched on a federated basis, providing the potential for an officer to see all of the known facts about a person, object, location or event and therefore make an informed decision more quickly.
Police officers have enough on their plate without having to process mountains of paperwork at the end of every shift. And yet simply taking a witness statement or issuing a ticket for a driving offence results in lots of paperwork which means more time sat at their desk at the end of their shift when they should be out on patrol or following up an investigation. While the public sector as a whole has been encouraged to go “cloud-first” and “digital-by-default” since 2012, many police forces are still largely paper-based. Not only would digitisation save the police force valuable time, it could also save a huge amount of money. To quote just one example, Avon and Somerset Constabulary calculated it could save £323,943 per year in back office costs just from rolling out digital statements to its officers. That is just one process in one force going digital. Imagine what could be achieved nationwide. Police IT and its adoption of new tech has been branded a “mess”. It’s time that changed.