Our Digital Ambition and Priorities – Police Digital Service

This strategy considers the internal and external pressures facing the service and presents five key digital ambitions, each with a set of digital priorities to guide focus and investment.

For each of these ambitions we envisaged the service we want to be in 2030, and how we can harness the opportunities of existing and disruptive digital technologies and capabilities.

Seamless citizen experience: We will deliver seamless, digitally enabled experiences. The public will have more choice in how they engage with us, using channels, media or devices most relevant to them. We will be able to connect citizen interactions, information and data across departments, and across forces to build a more credible and richer intelligence picture, all whilst maintaining public trust by ethically acquiring, exploiting and sharing their data.
Addressing harm: We will harness the power of digital technologies and behaviours to identify the risk of harm and protect the vulnerable in the physical and digital world. We will deliver earlier, more precise and targeted proactive policing approaches and early interventions through the application of digital technology.
Enabling officers and staff through digital: We will invest in our people, from leadership through to the front-line, to ensure they are equipped with the right capabilities (knowledge, skills and tools) to deal with increasingly complex crimes. We will establish digital leadership and ways of working to allow our workforce to focus on critical and value-adding activities.
Embedding a whole public system approach: We will foster a philosophy of openness and deepen our collaboration with our public sector partners to jointly design and tackle complex public safety issues – sharing data insights and making use of digital tools to work more effectively across the public safety system, ensuring we do so in an ethical way to safeguard public trust.
Empower the private sector: We will strengthen our relationships with the private sector to empower it to appropriately share in public safety responsibilities. The private sector, and the users of its services, have always shared responsibility for elements of public safety and, as technologies become easier and more accessible, there are new ways to safely empower those with an active desire to help

You can read more about each ambition by expanding the accordions below.

Seamless citizen experience

We will deliver seamless, digitally enabled experiences.
The public will have more choice in how they engage with us, using channels, media or devices most relevant to them. We will be able to connect citizen interactions, information and data across departments, and across forces to build a more credible and richer intelligence picture, all whilst maintaining public trust by ethically acquiring, exploiting and sharing their data.
Priorities
1. We will make every digital interaction with us frictionless. The public will have the ability to contact us through relevant digital channels, submit multimedia evidence and self-serve for appropriate low-risk situations (if they choose) – all in a consistent and intuitive manner, irrespective of channel choice.
2. We will enhance physical experiences through digital means. This means we will use digital tools to improve the end-to-end citizen journey, and specifically the physical interactions within this, such as witness statements being enriched through body worn video footage collection.
3. We will harness shared data and connected devices ethically and securely. This means we will give the public the option to share data in near real-time where this is ethical and secure, allowing us to be more targeted in how we support public safety.
4. We will use digital technologies to enable the public to protect their communities. The public will be able to access policing platforms and channels to play a significant role in protecting themselves and their communities – in a way which is safe, appropriate and delivers positive policing outcomes and reduces the demand we face.

Addressing harm

We will harness the power of digital technologies and behaviours to identify the risk of harm and protect the vulnerable in the physical and digital world.
We will deliver earlier, more precise and targeted proactive policing approaches and early interventions through the application of digital technology.
Priorities
1. We will translate evolving definitions of threat, harm and risk (THR) into digital formats that complement human judgement. This means we will have digital formats for THR definitions that enable us to significantly improve our use of intelligent technologies to more rapidly and precisely address risk of harm or of offending, including recognising when and where digital technologies and channels are part of the risk exposure.
2. We will use digital tools to rapidly identify harm related behaviours in order to target interventions. We will have the digital capabilities to more precisely identify, and appropriately
intervene where citizens are at risk of harm, or of offending at key moments. This will also allow us to
be more informed and effective in our approach to community and neighbourhood policing.
3. We will use digital tools to disrupt criminal activity. We will have the digital capability to identify the potential for harm to large groups of the public, and to disrupt this activity accordingly. Key to this will be our ability to disrupt large-scale threats online, and organised criminal groups which exploit technology.
4. We will design and deliver digitally-enabled interventions that work across boundaries. We will adopt digital technologies such as automated data-sharing mechanisms and data analysis tools to deliver more targeted and digitally supported interventions to prevent harm, across forces and with partners, in a streamlined and efficient manner which avoids duplication of efforts,

Enabling officers and staff through digital

We will invest in our people, from leadership through to the front-line, to ensure they are equipped with the right knowledge, skills and tools to deal with increasingly complex crimes.
We will establish digital leadership and ways of working to allow our workforce to focus on critical and value adding activities.
Priorities
1. We will digitise core policing processes — removing the need for manual, repetitive and duplicative business processes, increasing our officers’ and staff’s operational efficiency.
2. We will develop a digitally literate workforce and leadership. We will foster a culture of constant learning and evolution to equip our workforce, from leadership through to the front-line, with the knowledge, skills and support to fully harness digital technologies, intelligent insights and connected ways of working – helping us reduce our reliance on external expertise.
3. We will provide officers and staff with the digital tools they need. This means a workforce that is
digitally enabled, by default, with technology that seeks to replicate the intuitiveness of consumer
experiences – increasing their situational awareness and ability to make informed decisions.
4. We will establish specialist digital service hubs and cross-force networks. We will have the capability to tackle the most tech-dependent and enabled crimes, pooling expertise from all appropriate talent in a way that delivers desired outcomes for all forces.
5. We will establish new digitally-enabled, dynamic workforce models. This means we will have more flexible workforce models, allowing us to attract more talent, offer flexible career routes to retain talent, and even temporarily source individuals when surge capacity is needed. We will use digital technologies to have a more accurate and dynamic picture of ‘demand and supply’ to inform
deployment decisions.

Embedding a whole public system approach

We will foster a philosophy of openness and deepen our collaboration with our public sector partners and criminal justice partners to jointly design and tackle complex public safety issues.
This means sharing data insights and making use of digital tools to work more effectively across the public safety system, ensuring we do so in an ethical way to safeguard public trust.
Priorities
1. We will deepen our collaboration with public sector agencies to unlock effectiveness. Using digital
technology and ways of working jointly designed with our partners means we will be able to collaborate effectively in a consistent manner, without having to re-build the foundations every time.
2. We will develop ‘fluid’ data and insight exchange between public sector agencies, within appropriate ethical and legal boundaries. This means we will be able to exchange information between public agencies, providing the whole system with richer public safety insights that cannot be created in isolation.
3. We will support the creation of integrated digital public services for public safety. The public will be able to address their public safety issues through a more consistent citizen journey, without constraints arising from public agency silos.

Empower the private sector

We will strengthen our relationships with the private sector to empower it to appropriately share in public safety responsibilities.
The private sector, and the users of its services, have always shared responsibility for elements of public safety and, as technologies become easier and more accessible, there are new ways to safely empower those with an active desire to help. But we must better define the nature of this responsibility to ensure this is effective, and to ensure that addressing the growing threat, harm and risk in digital spaces does not solely fall on the police.
Priorities
1. We will help define expectations through open dialogue with the private sector but also with input from citizens. We will be able to clarify expectations and responsibilities in public safety protection, to have a clearer ongoing delineation of roles and accountabilities. This includes the definition of the police’s role in providing the national cyber security infrastructure to create a secure environment for business to operate within.
2. We will help build awareness of digital threat, harm and risk. This means we will work with partners to encourage more private companies, and their customers, to become more aware of these risks and understand how they can protect against it.
3. We will support the private sector role in digitally-enabled public safety. We will collaborate strategically with the private sector to help them ensure their products and services are secure by design — preventing them from being an unwilling enabler to harm.
4. We will foster a vibrant PoliceTech landscape. This means we will stimulate a competitive and innovative supplier landscape while working to actively remove commercial barriers. This will allow us to procure technology which suits policing needs while also aggregating our buying power to ensure we are increasing value for money.

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