THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 different agencies, and we’ll email each other a load of Excel tables, and we’ll try and stick them together into a report. “The problem again and again with that is it’s not reproducible or sustainable, it’s not the modern way of working. We will look back, probably in a year or two from now, and laugh that we were doing this because it is ridiculous, it’s inefficient, it’s inaccurate, and it’s not sustainable. What we should be doing is building data – data pipelines particularly – by leveraging some of the Azure-based or cloud-based technology. “We should be making that product, whatever it is, as reproducible as possible, so that we can look at the things that are in our strategic needs assessment at any point in the year – not just once a year, by which time that report is out of date anyway. There could be live time metrics we’re able to see and visualise in dashboards; and making that a bit more real, how we do that is with taking data from source systems.” Alongside technological advances, changing attitudes and new legislation, suppliers themselves also have a crucial role to play in meeting the data challenges. Iain Donnelly, who is now an adviser to technology companies working with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, believes the procurement process can also act as a barrier to ensuring that the most up-to-date technology is available to police in relation to data collation, extraction and analysis. “Having been in the police most of my working life, and to now be seeing it from the perspective of a supplier, it can be incredibly frustrating trying to deal with policing,” he told Policing Insight. “The decision-making process is painfully slow and massively risk-averse when it comes to innovation, with far too many layers of governance to have to try and work through within every single force. As soon as there’s procurement, information security people, the IT department, everyone wants to line up in order to say no. That’s what it feels like.” More small suppliers Iain would advocate increasing the proportion of policing IT spend with a wider range of smaller suppliers – rather than always defaulting to the “big players” – and also encouraging suppliers themselves to build partnerships that deliver products which offer solutions to a wider range of data challenges. However the spend is spread out, it seems that local, force-level innovation and regional collaborations, which feed into a federated “single source” of information and intelligence, will be crucial to tackling the scale and complexity of data in investigations of the future. A key issue in delivering this – and one which we will look at in a future article in this series – is the where the human resource sits in meeting these data challenges.