THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 In most cases the current uses of these new techniques are focusing on crimes that have already taken place, and identifying the criminals and their networks who have committed them. That holds true whether the technology is employed on large datasets to identify targets – such as in NCA’s Operation Venetic, or in the work of TOEX – or to help guide response action, such as the increasingly advanced decision intelligence platforms now in place in some forces, which have both data fusion and analytics capabilities. Importantly, the end result of all of these processes is usable data, advisory packages and insights which can empower staff who themselves may have minimal analytics knowledge and skills. But aside from the reactive use of these forms of technology, what of the proactive potential? Prediction and prevention “Every single serious case review you pick up, you will find that data sharing is a problem,” said Thames Valley Supt Lewis Prescott-Mayling, who played a lead role in establishing the Thames Valley Together multi-agency platform as part of his work with the force’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). “But there’s less in serious case reviews about what actually needs to be done so that agencies are not blinded to those problems until someone has already come to harm. “I think we do keep reverting to type in policing, in that when we say we want an analytical product, it’s quite oſten descriptive of what’s already happened around, say, a crime profile, or a journey of a person, or a social network. “Very little of that is predictive, about how that’s going to affect the future, and we never really get to the stage of diagnostic, so that we can diagnose our tactical options, what we should do, and measure whether it has an effect.” Combining the “huge, huge, huge opportunities in fairly low-hanging fruit around robotic processing”, with “machine learning to identify text strings or keywords” could, he believes, change the policing approach. “We are developing what you could call artificial intelligence around a machine learning model. It’s using a random forest model at the moment to predict high-harm domestic abuse in the future. “When you start applying natural language processing to key words, phrases, and things that might be associated with human trafficking, you pull out of the woodwork tons of intelligence that actually begins to show links, and a broader pattern.” Sir David Thompson former West Midlands Chief Constable Former West Midlands Chief Constable Sir David Thompson