THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 The impact of legislation While there maybe issues around data ownership and risk aversion when it comes to data sharing – which is crucial if the in-force analyst highlighted by Dylan Alldridge is really to have that “single view” of all the information pulled in from a 150 different places – it’s not only advances in technology and changes in attitude that will play a part; legislation may also be key. Thames Valley Supt Lewis Prescott-Mayling is well aware of some of the statutory duties on police forces and other agencies around data sharing, having played a lead role in establishing the Thames Valley Together platform as part of his work with the force’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). The platform aims to overcome many of the barriers to sharing information across organisational boundaries by allowing local authorities, police, HM Prisons & Probation and wider partners to share information securely, with the appropriate levels of control. The system helps partners to develop plans to address violence and its causes; it has been recognised as national best practice, and the Home Office is supporting its wider roll-out to other VRUs across the country. While the focus is more around safeguarding and prevention than crime investigation, Supt Prescott-Mayling – who is now the force’s Strategic Lead for tackling serious violence, and the Research and Innovation Lead for Policing Chief Scientific Adviser Prof Paul Taylor – believes the new duties as well as pressure from inspectorates could help to bring about real change. “Fundamentally we should be sharing and bringing this data together across the partnership anyway – we’re required to do that under the Crime and Disorder Act obligations – but we now have a new legal duty to be sharing that data under the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act that went live in this year,” he told Policing Insight. “That’s actually a legal obligation on us as a police force to share data specifically on risk and protective factors for violence. That approach came out of the Serious Violence Strategy from 2018; it’s also all over the Police Foundation Strategic Review, and in the latest HMICFRS report on how well the police tackle youth violence. They’re all making the same point really, that we need to share data better to understand risk and need. “Quite often people decide, right, we’re going to share some information to do a strategic needs assessment – perhaps a joint strategic needs assessment – and we’ll probably extract that data via some extraction logic tool. We’ll do it, all of our analysts will do it across the Thames Valley Supt Lewis Prescott-Mayling “What we should be doing is building data – data pipelines particularly – by leveraging some of the Azure-based or cloud-based technology” Supt Lewis Prescott-Mayling Thames Valley