THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 There’s little doubt that the swift and significant advances in technology over recent years have led to huge increases in the volume and range of data that is potentially available to police to develop intelligence and aid investigations. But with those advances come new challenges. The sheer scale of the data that can be gathered is almost unimaginable, so extracting relevant information is akin to looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The equally vast range of data sources – particularly from unstructured formats such as text documents, audio files, images and video – means that not only can extraction be a much more complex process, but collating and cleaning consistent data that can be analysed and shared across police forces and agencies presents whole new areas of difficulty. And while law enforcement can use those technological advances to help meet some of those challenges, the current speed of change means that new technology can soon become out of date, as can the skillsets required to leverage the maximum benefits from the software and hardware. That pace of evolution has also prompted concerns from The police data challenge: Complexity, scale, and the search for the ‘single source of truth’ The exponential growth in data sources offers policing significant opportunities for investigating and intelligence gathering, but brings with it new obstacles around the scale, complexity and consistency of data; in the first in a series of five features looking at the police use of data, Policing Insight’s Keith Potter looks at some of those key challenges at a force and national level. The ‘Police Data Challenge’ is an independent series researched and written by Policing Insight and commissioned by Cognyte. Policing Insight is the leading platform to keep up with the latest in progressive policing. It is where the global police and criminal justice community both consume and share knowledge, opinion and analysis. Cognyte is a market leader in investigative analytics soſtware that empowers a variety of government and other organizations with Actionable Intelligence for a Safer World™. Find out more at www.cognyte.com/nexyte. Keith Potter is the editor of Policing Insight