Police, Data, Action!

What viewers probably don’t glean from the vast array of police shows on TV is just how data intensive crime fighting can be – but when you look at the numbers, it should become obvious.

The West Midlands Police finds itself dealing with massive amounts of data on a day-to-day basis. The UK’s second largest police force outside the Greater London Area, WMP serves over 350 square miles and has 2.8 million citizens to take care of. On average it deals with around 2,000 emergency calls a day.

According to the force’s IT and digital director Helen Davis, before its move to the cloud all the data captured by the officers at WMP, whether back at HQ or the field, ran in disparate silos.

The data wasn’t all accurate either. Names and addresses of people would look different in different databases, spelt differently, not updated in some, while updated in others.

“Officers were having to access multiple systems to find information – but scarily we didn’t have a single source of ‘truth’,” Davis acknowledges.

Police on patrol would typically radio in to find out license plate details or location data – and wait for around 30 or 40 mins for a reply or drive back to the station to access it – again not something you see on TV; the info is always provided instantly!

Response time is critical in policing and Davis realised that unlocking this siloed information presented a great opportunity to improve the efficiency of police on patrol as well as its service to the public.

“In an ideal world what we’d like is for all our data to be cleansed and in one place; and to be able to access it and report on it easily. We’d also really like it if officers and staff could self-serve, preferably from a mobile device,” she adds.

Buy in

As the first force to moot a move to the cloud, Davis’s first hurdle, she recalls, was getting the permission to do so. “Getting accreditation nationally was difficult and time-consuming. We had to convince a number of stakeholders that it was safe and the right thing to do,” she adds.

What Davis assumed would take a couple of meetings turned into an 11-month conversation with the Home Office and other national bodies.

“We still operate in a hybrid environment. We can’t put everything in the cloud for a number of reasons. There are certain sets of data that we will never be able to put in there for security reasons. It’s getting less and less but there will always be an element of that,” says Davis.

Once the authorities were convinced, the challenge of the data processing commenced.

“A lot of the data we had wasn’t in a great state,” says Davis. “We naively thought the cleansing activity would be quite quick and straightforward – especially as we had a data strategy in place. But it was hard work,” she says.

In a policing first, the WMP partnered with Cloudera and Accenture to help the force on its journey to the cloud and to improve its data and analytics capabilities.

According to Davis, updating WMP’s data framework on Cloudera’s platform meant that data could now be accessed anywhere, at any time, without storage limitations. The data software manufacturer claims that the framework enables users to expand data storage as and when needed, without having to sacrifice any current, valuable information.

Data hub

At the very heart of the project is a data hub where every piece of information is consolidated, no matter where it originated. This created the much-needed ‘single source of truth’ for all police data, providing the WMP with a more efficient technology platform.

Once the new technology and data platform were up and running the force was able to use a Data Insights facility to create an app that police on the beat could use on their phone, which enabled them to look up information in seconds.

The key benefit of this has been a huge improvement in the speed at which the team can pull queries.

For instance, the ability to get on-the-spot information about a person, car registration or location, via the database, means police officers can check key details, such as whether the car has been reported stolen or the person is a known offender.

This allows officers to take the appropriate action at the moment, rather than having to return to the station to find out the information and potentially miss the opportunity to act.

“We’ve literally saved officers hours a day,” says Davis.

According to Davis, even though a data strategy was in place. getting people on board organisationally was a constant challenge.

“During the transformation you might have another project setting up or another IT system coming online, and you’d say to the business ‘what are you doing with the data?’ and there was still this tendency to leave this until the end.

“But we needed to figure this out at the beginning because we have all this beautifully cleansed data that we don’t’ want it messed up – so we made ‘data first’ one of the key elements of our technology strategy.”

The questions every IT and Data project must ask now include: What is the data do you need and where is it going?

“That sounds basic,” says Davis, “but it’s easy to get carried away with the tech or solving the problem because as a police force we’re very good at reacting and thinking about the here and now rather than the long term.”

Trusted AI

With clean data and a hub housing a single source of truth it was also then possible to throw predictive analytics into the mix.

WMP has a team of data scientist that can now use this data to make decisions. This might include how many officers to deploy for a football match based on previous history – or it might involve placing a knife crime taskforce in a particular area in a city.

“That’s helping us change the way we do policing because sometimes the areas it suggests aren’t ones that we wouldn’t necessarily have considered before.”

However, Davis adds that her mantra as far as AI has always been “just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should”.

Working in tandem with the machine learning team WMP established an ethics committee that comprises of 40 independent members. All computer-based decisions are taken via this committee in the public domain.

Lessons learned

Becoming the first force to go online means Davis has lessons to share.

In terms of convincing the people that matter that it’s the right thing to do for your organisation, Davis recommends brining internal stakeholders along with you on the journey.

“With cloud you need this because the benefit isn’t always financial. It makes things more efficient, but it can be a battle to get investment if there’s no direct ROI,” she says.

She also recommends educating stakeholders on the cloud – some of whom might compare the cost unfavourably to their own personal iTunes account.

“It’s about getting over those conceptions: Cloud isn’t free and it’s certainly not cheap. To the point that now we are deploying a cloud consumption analyst to look at our tariffs to make sure we are getting best value out of that,” she says.

“Anyone who works with our finance colleagues will tell you that they don’t like surprises. We are trying to get better at predicting the cost. It’s not always the cheapest option and sometimes we have to consider that.”

The only other thing Davis says they underestimated was WMP’s new love of data analytic dashboards. Each department wanted slightly different ones, depending on the type of data they were trying to access and the use case.

“We’ve gone from two or three to literally hundreds. And we underestimated how resource intensive it is to give every superintendent of every head of department their own dashboards. We now need to reign in a little. We keep saying we are still at the start of our journey – it’s been a few years now – but it still feels that way.”

*Helen Davis was speaking at Cloudera’s London-based Evolve conference for data and analytics leaders last month