THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 (WMP) Superintendent Iain Donnelly played a leading role in the development of the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), a project that demonstrates the capability to use advanced data analytics to provide actionable insights from police datasets. The foundation phase of the project (which is run by WMP on behalf of the Home Office) focused on gun and knife crime, modern slavery, and workforce wellbeing. “Certainly the thinking was – and still is – that if we can harness a lot of this data that sits across policing in lots of different pots and silos and then use the latest thinking around machine learning to make sense of massive datasets and extract insights from them, it’s a complete no-brainer,” said Iain. “Why wouldn’t you want to do that? But like everything else in life, until you actually start doing something, you don’t realise just how complicated it is, both from a technical point of view and also from a governance and ethical point of view.” For Iain, while there were obvious technical challenges – for example, identifying and extracting ‘key predictive indicators’ from the 600 million lines of data supplied by three forces – the technology was not the only challenge. “We had £4.5million Police Innovation Fund allotted money to do this, and most of that was spent on very expensive data scientists, data engineers, project managers, etc. We had the best people – it was very, very expensive, but they were very, very good; this stuff doesn’t come cheap,” explained Iain. “The second big hurdle we came up against was a massive reluctance on the part of forces to give us the data. At the end of that 12-month foundation phase, we had data from only three of the seven forces involved – the other four point-blank refused to give us data. “There’s a massive disconnect between the strategic stakeholders at chief officer rank, who say ‘Yes, we want to do this’, and then as soon as the project starts, you get the local information security, information management and the local IT people involved, and you can have any answer you want as long as it’s ‘no’. “They were citing GDPR issues… a lot of that is driven by fear, fear of being fined by the Information Commissioner, and they were super-nervous about falling foul of the new GDPR legislation that at the time nobody really understood. “Another big issue is that a lot of the use of police cutting-edge technology gets misrepresented by certain parts of the media as being ‘Big Brother’. The media will misrepresent what you’re trying to do and scare everyone with Doomsday-type scenarios about police misusing our data, targeting young black men, further criminalising certain sections of the public, etc, when what you’re trying to do is actually a very pure thing.” Former West Midlands Police Superintendent Iain Donnelly