The Big Picture – Police Digital Service

Policing is at a critical juncture. We either improve how we harness digital opportunities from existing and emerging technologies, or we are at risk of becoming overwhelmed by the demand they create and lose the chance to enhance and modernise our policing services.

The pace of technology continues to advance and digital adoption is accelerating. Policing does not exist in a vacuum: we must respond to evolving demands on our service, and overcome the internal challenges that currently hamper us.

We cannot continue as we have been doing – impeded by complex decision-making structures and hampered by the challenges of modernising a legacy infrastructure. The time is right for us to make fundamental and transformational choices: the way we work, harness data, exploit technologies, collaborate with partners, and organise ourselves.

Change will never be this slow again

The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again. We are living through remarkable advances in mobile, cloud, artificial intelligence, sensors and analytics. As society becomes increasingly connected – with people spending more and more time online [1] and our dependence on digital technologies and channels grows – our police service needs to catch up, and keep up, with a constantly evolving digital landscape.

A majority of UK citizens expect us to adopt technology to keep them safe from traditional crime [2]. They also expect this adoption to take place at a quicker rate than criminals who are exploiting advanced technologies to cause harm [3].

Digital adoption is expanding the availability of data

Over the last two years, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated [4]. This growth of data goes hand-in-hand with an increasingly sophisticated ability and need to analyse large datasets to discover trends, and use of artificial intelligence to quickly support decision making with insights drawn from vast quantities of information.
The potential benefits are immense. Data-driven insight has the potential to be a ‘force multiplier’ – increasing the predictability, precision, pace and impact of our interventions, from simple chat bots that use historic data to better support citizens, to more complex systems that can provide insight into crime location and optimum resource deployment. This game-changing promise of big data and machine learning requires policing to treat data as a strategic asset in how it is captured, managed and analysed. It also requires a collective commitment to its secure flow across our forces and partners, with a proportionate attitude to risk, transparent debate, and a commitment to the ethical use of data

Threats and opportunities are being unlocked

Advanced technology is no longer the exclusive domain of big corporations and governments; falling costs are accelerating the pace of development, and disrupting our economy and society. It is increasingly affordable and accessible. In 1967, storing one gigabyte of data would have cost £800,000 – today it costs less than £0.016 [5]. This democratisation of technology introduces opportunities for criminals, which in turn presents a major threat to public safety; it is estimated that more than 90% of reported crime now has a digital element [6] – enabling threats, increasing their complexity and generating evidence. We need a service that embraces the same sophisticated technologies to tackle the evolving demand.

Evolution of demand and response — traditional crime

The nature of “traditional” threats has evolved with digital platforms and technology. Almost every traditional crime now has a digital element to it in terms of both how it was committed, and how we can investigate it.
Organised Crime Groups across Europe can now use mobile encryption services and platform based business models to trade, taking advantage of multiple technologies (messaging applications and satellite navigation) to expand their market reach, increasing the societal financial burden and violence associated with it.
The accessibility of these adopted technologies allows such groups to enter other criminal markets, increasing the likelihood of poly-criminal groups [7]. Likewise, digital technologies are a key part of the solution in fighting organised crime. We are increasingly working with search engine companies to provide targeted (preventative) messaging in response to search terms synonymous with gang related activities [8].

Building on Policing Vision 2025
This Digital Strategy for policing builds on the Policing Vision 2025 to lay the foundations for a police service which is fit for 2030.
It sets out the:
- Ambition for how digital can transform key dimensions of the police service alongside the priorities that support this.
- Key data and technology enablers that will provide the foundation for digital transformation, with implications on our people, ethics and policing capabilities.
- Considerations for how policing mobilises and organises effectively to deliver the strategy over the next five years.

Evolution of demand and response — new and emerging crime

While we cannot predict precisely how crime will evolve, new types of cyber-crime, fraud and digitally enabled sexual exploitation illustrate a fundamental change in the profile of demand that a modern police service must deal with. Technology is acting as an accelerator of harm as digital connectivity becomes more pervasive.
Cyber-crime is posing an increasing challenge to individuals, businesses and our democratic institutions – and although challenging to quantify, estimates for
the cost of this to the UK economy range from £4.6bn [9] to £27bn a year [10]. New threats will rapidly evolve over the next 5-10 years, such as the use of ‘deepfake’ videos to manufacture social unrest [11], and the hacking of autonomous infrastructure. Strengthening policing’s ability to anticipate, and be more responsive to, such changes is a key consideration for this strategy.

Transforming our service

We must not mistake “digital” as an end in itself, but understand it instead as an enabler of our mission of preventing harm. It needs to be integrated into how our services are modernised, alongside our partners, and complemented by the skills our people need to do their jobs. We must better coordinate the upgrading of our service, and learn the lessons of the last 5-10 years to foster innovation and deliver transformation.
Our focus will not be limited to how we use data, or deploy digital capabilities and new technologies to improve our operations and services; we will also focus on how we protect our critical infrastructure with the right level of security to mitigate cyber threats.
Our digital journey is not starting from scratch, forces and national programmes are already delivering change through a number of in-flight activities. However, there is much to do if we are to deliver tangible change by 2025 and lay the foundations for 2030. Success will be apparent when we collectively stop talking about digital transformation because it has become the norm.
In 2018, the police service in England and Wales spent c.£1.4bn on technology and around 30% of technology staff spend is on resources to maintain on premise infrastructure. Our IT budget is approximately 11% of the annual policing spend so we have a clear obligation to maximise the benefit that we realise from that investment. The implementation of additional technology places an upward pressure on IT costs which we must mitigate by reducing expenditure on our legacy estate.
The challenges in modernising our data and technology are well known: legacy technology and supplier lock-in; our organisational structures; underinvestment in key areas; conservative risk appetite; and inconsistent understanding of our data. We must commission new work wisely, and avoid the development of new national systems where off-the-shelf products are already available. When we implement new technology our focus should be on re-use of designs and approaches across forces to maximise efficiency and learning across the whole policing system.
Our expenditure is spread across three areas of investment and we must look critically at how efficiently money is spent in all three areas.

Together we can overcome the challenges

The strategy is written with the firm belief that the challenges associated with modernisation are surmountable, provided they are part of a concerted and coordinated movement across policing in England and Wales.
We need to move together across forces on this, realising economies of scale, sharing skills and generating insight; this could be in how we embed digital leadership and capabilities, how we get the most out of our legacy systems, how we ensure we achieve carbon neutral solutions, or how we innovate with emerging technologies. Mobilisation of this strategy is an opportunity to take stock of the specific changes required to better coordinate how we achieve this.

References

1. 13 to 34 year olds spend an average of four and half hours a day online. “Online Nation 2019 Report – Ofcom” (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/149146/online-nation-report.pdf)

2. 62% of citizens think increased use of technology by police, border agencies and government as a whole will make them more secure. ”What do Citizens want – Accenture Research, 2018”

3. 55%“of citizens agreed with the following statement: “[Police] will need to keep up and be able to stay one step ahead of the online criminals.” in response to the question “Over the next 10 years, technology trends will influence the types of crimes being committed (e.g. hacking of personal data, online financial fraud, online bullying etc.), as well as our communities and how we live. How do you think your expectations of the Police might change as a result?”. “Crowdsourced Citizen Research – Deloitte 2019”

4. “Big Data, for better or worse: 90% of world’s data generated over last two years – SINTEF” (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm)

5. “Data storage goes from $1M to 2 cents per gigabyte”, Computer World, 2017 (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3182207/cw50-data-storage-goes-from-1m-to-2-cents-per-gigabyte)

6. More than 90% of reported crime now has a digital element. Often this involves the police investigator retrieving evidence from digital devices and this includes social media, mobile phone applications and the Internet. [Please note, this link is no longer active but is retained here for reference purposes] “Internet Intelligence and Investigation (III Project) Full Business Case – Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime” (https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/pcd_525_part_1_internet_intelligence_and_investigation)

7. For almost all types of organised crime, criminals are deploying and adapting technology with ever greater skill and to ever greater effect. The number
of organised crime groups that are involved in more than one criminal activity (poly-criminal) has increased sharply over the last years (45% in 2017 compared to 33% in 2013). “Crime in the age of technology – Europol’s serious and organised crime threat assessment 2017”, (Crime in the age of technology – Europol’s Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2017 | Europol (europa.eu)

8. The Home Office invested £600,000 in Project Arachnid, software that can be deployed across websites, forums, chat services and newsgroups to instantaneously detect illegal content. “Serious Violence Strategy – HM Government” (Serious Violence Strategy – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk))

9. “2017 Norton Cyber Security Insights Report – Symantec” (https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/about/2017-ncsir-global-comparison-united-kingdom)

10.“The Cost of Cyber Crime – Deltica & Cabinet Office” (the-cost-of-cyber-crime-full-report.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)

11. According to Jack Clark, Policy Director for OpenAI, much of the worries [OpenAI] have about the future of media relate to the increasing ease with which
we’ll be able to cheaply create ‘fake’ rich media and use this to mount public opinion campaigns which could accentuate societal divisions, or cause political destabilization . “Written testimony of Jack Clark, OpenAI, for The National Security Challenges of Artificial Intelligence, Manipulated Media, and ‘Deep Fakes’ Hearing – House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ”, (https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/clark_deepfakes_sfr.pdf)

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