THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 “Technology is not an inhibitor now, and it’s not huge amounts of cost once you understand what you’re doing; now it’s just around driving it forward across the professional partnerships and making sure we’re all willing to do this. “I do think the opportunities outweigh the risks, although they are big risks. People think that AI will be predicting, but we’re not Minority Report. It’s almost ridiculous – and slightly lazy – that it keeps getting used as a narrative, because it doesn’t allow us to have an actual debate about what’s possible, which is way beyond the headline. And we, and communities, and the wider public, all need to be talking more nuanced than that headline.” Those conversations also need to include suppliers; for Dylan Alldridge, having a clear idea of where policing wants to be in the next few years is essential both for local forces and industry, which will be crucial to local innovation. “You have to have that clear sense of this is where we want to be in one year, this is where we’ll be in three years, this is where we want to be in 10 years,” said Dylan. “It needs to be a balance of ambitious and pragmatic, and then work with industry and local policing to say how do we get there? “I think within two years ideally we should be in a place where we’ve really broken the back of our data quality issue. We can’t keep talking about it; it’s a difficult one, but actually we need to really push on and get to a place where our data quality is of a sufficient standard. “I think we should have enough evaluated evidence around what machine learning, natural language processing, large language models could and should do across policing data. “But the one thing I think that policing doesn’t need any more of is strategies; what we need now are the road maps to operationalise those strategies.” “In policing we will always have to have human intervention. There’ll always have to be somebody with professional knowledge who can make sense of the things that the automated process spits out the other end of the sausage machine.” CC Lisa Winward NPCC National Intelligence Lead