THE POLICE DATA CHALLENGE Copyright Policing Insight/Cognyte 2023 Advances in technology are inevitably offering policing huge opportunities to leverage investigative advantage from the vast volume of digital data that is now available, as well as creating new challenges around how the relevant detail can be identified and extracted from a complex mountain of information. It’s clear that being able to adopt the latest technology around decision intelligence platforms, coupled with analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning capabilities, will help to address part of that challenge. So too will ensuring that police forces have the knowledge, expertise and funding available to them to maximise that digital data potential. But it’s not all about skills and soſtware. With acknowledged concerns over public trust and confidence in policing, the issue of the ethical use of new technology will inevitably be a key part of the debate. The ethics of how police gather, store and analyse data, together with policing’s use of new technologies such as AI and machine learning – and any potential for bias within those systems – is therefore another challenge that must be addressed. The police data challenge: Ethics, governance, and policing legitimacy The investigative opportunities and challenges offered to policing by the huge growth in digital data bring with them a much wider debate around the ethical use of such data, the importance of transparency and governance, and the need to ensure that policing maintains legitimacy with the communities it serves – issues which Policing Insight’s Keith Potter explores in the latest in a series features looking at the police use of data. The ‘Police Data Challenge’ is an independent series researched and written by Policing Insight and commissioned by Cognyte. Policing Insight is the leading platform to keep up with the latest in progressive policing. It is where the global police and criminal justice community both consume and share knowledge, opinion and analysis. Cognyte is a market leader in investigative analytics soſtware that empowers a variety of government and other organizations with Actionable Intelligence for a Safer World™. Find out more at www.cognyte.com/nexyte. Keith Potter is the editor of Policing Insight