“I’m genuinely excited about the fact that Police are starting to work on solutions that are developed once and then re-used by many forces. Increasingly, this new behaviour allows policing to be more joined up and enables the sharing of data & intelligence.” – Mark Goossens, IBM’s Client Director for Police
IBM is one of the world’s leading technology innovators, with a strong track record of providing innovative solutions to Law Enforcement globally. We were the first company to engage with the Home Office and then NEW Police ICT Company to deliver a national agreement for capabilities to be used by all UK Law Enforcement. This deal in 2015 has paved the way to all UK Law Enforcement standardising on a set of tooling for Analytics and Visual Analysis of all Police POLE Data. More details of the agreement can be found here.
Expanding on this theme we feel that IBM’s breadth of offerings and client engagements means that, working with the Police ICT Company strategically, we can bring more to UK Policing. A good example is Digital Evidence Management, where the basic requirement is to store and share large amounts of text, audio, image and increasingly video data, securely and resiliently. Storing video is around 2,000 times as big a problem as storing text and so the scale of the problem for police is growing massively. Bringing learning from other industries into policing will be extremely beneficial: Netflix & Sky are great examples and recently, IBM helped Sky transition from a typical cloud environment for this to a hybrid virtual object store – and save 42% of their costs.
In addition, bringing the best solutions from law enforcement across the globe could be very valuable. Working with New York Police Department we’ve built Project Cobalt, an automated, real-time information matching service which takes live feeds from their RMS and other internal systems and merges this with Open Source Intel to give up to date intelligence to assist in dispatch, handling of incidents in progress and live investigations. The software that underpins this is available in the Access for All agreement.
The Police ICT Company and IBM are exploring potential areas for collaboration including expanding the work done with Essex Police on Modern Slavery to also encompass the related areas of Child Exploitation, County Lines and the broader aspects of Organised Crime and expanding the work done with Avon & Somerset Constabulary around Robotic Process Automation.