THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 Winward as the “single point of truth” for police intelligence and data, one which, rather than being a data source in itself, acts as a gateway into vast pots of data that come “down the tube every day” from forces and other agencies. The figures are astounding, as Vicky Hough, NPCC Intelligence Portfolio Staff Officer and herself a former analyst, explained: “The PND obviously connects not only intelligence but crime custody data, domestic violence etc, and there are currently 5.8 billion searchable records, and 99.9 million intelligence reports. “That doesn’t include all the mobile devices that have been seized – the downloads and the content of that – because you couldn’t cope with that. So we’re relying on people in specialist positions extracting the information and the intelligence, and putting it onto the PND, which gives us that connectivity.” And policing is not the only source of data for the PND – 55 agencies and 250 source systems also feed into database. However, alongside managing the scale of that data resource, policing at a national level faces other key challenges – ensuring that data and intelligence obtained at local force and agency level continues to be fed into the PND in a usable format, regardless of the systems that forces employ, and that once there, it is accessible to all those frontline analysts, officers and specialists who need it. “The task for us, at a national level, is to coalesce all of the chief constables on this being the single point of truth,” CC Winward told Policing Insight. “So where are the forces? We don’t want to reduce the amount of innovation that’s going on. We don’t want to quell some of that excellent, best practice. But if somebody has a fantastic system that gathers some great data, we want it to come down the tube into the PND as opposed to it being a standalone system. “It’s not about stopping other systems existing, but how do we make sure those systems can speak to the PND so that we still have the single point of truth?” Clean and consistent The PND is currently the established data sharing model for UK policing at a national scale, and work is ongoing to explore how analytical tools and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) – technology that we will look at in a later feature in this series – can help to leverage the maximum potential of the database. That’s not to say, however, that policing is invariably and inexorably linked to the PND. The Home Office National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP) was set up in 2016, initially to replace both the Police National Computer (PNC) and the PND with a new Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS). “The two key factors for me are the volume and complexity of data and information, and the skills of the workforce. The breadth and depth of information that exists in the world now is staggering.” CC Lisa Winward NPCC Intelligence Portfolio Lead