THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 screen, and do federated natural language searching across all the available data?” added Dylan. “They don’t need to know that there’s plumbing pulling that from 150 different places; what they’re getting back is that single view of the information. “Data is also expensive to move and hold, and every time you move it you obviously generate risks, so from a SIRO’s [senior information risk owner’s] perspective, the fewer places that data is kept the better.” Global challenge It’s worth remembering that problems such as data cleansing and silo working are not solely an issue for policing in the UK (or just for policing, as opposed to other sectors or organisations). For example, New Zealand Police is often to be found at the cutting edge of many technological advances, but specialists within the force still recognise both the difficulties of sourcing intelligence from unstructured, ‘uncleansed’ data, and the dangers of data sitting in isolated pots within a larger system, as well as the opportunities for new technology to address some of those problems. James Foubister, who works as a Principal Advisor alongside the force’s Manager for Emerging Tech, Inspector Carla Gilmore, told Policing Insight that some of the biggest data challenges to date have been around connecting those data pots up, and accessing the right information from uncleansed data – both areas where new technology could make the processes significantly more efficient. “Generating a result based on a query is one thing; generating a real answer is different. When you query data you’re not actually looking for more data, you’re looking for an answer,” said James. “There’s not one single system in New Zealand Police; we’ve got lots of disparate data sources, and being able to connect those up in a holistic environment, I think, is the ‘one team, one dream’ of all policing agencies as far as I know. “There was a project that I worked on where I came up with the tagline ‘first, fast, and federated’. We needed to be the first place you’d go to for 90% of your results; we needed it to be a fast result; and it needed to be a federated result, so that you’re getting an answer from as comprehensive a source as you can. “When an executive says, ‘What are we doing about X?”, and you say, ‘Right, give me a moment, sir, I need to go and find this information in our holdings’, you want that search, that results set, and the answer you give based on those results to be as comprehensive as possible.” Massive disconnect If these challenges are not unique, they are also not new. Former West Midlands Police “We’ve got lots of disparate data sources, and being able to connect those up in a holistic environment is the ‘one team, one dream’ of all policing agencies as far as I know.” James Foubister New Zealand Police