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If emergency responders are told that all data is important, then nothing is important, that’s the message coming out loud and clear from the latest Emergency Services Times webinar. Getting data quality sorted, along with an emphasis on data skills and effective sharing with other agencies is critical to getting the blue lights ready for a future that makes the most of artificial intelligence.
Aimee Smith heads up data for the Met Police and given all the headlines about the capital’s police force, she says that data is more important than ever. Aimee says that if police officers don’t care about data, they won’t be effective in their decision making. In a world where the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, getting the data infrastructure right is crucial and that starts with three things: data quality, data skills and data sharing.
The conversation at this webinar starts with data quality. “We can’t even get the cops to put the data in right,” says Aimee. She adds that cops are told everything is important but when it comes to it, you can’t tell a police officer to stop what they’re doing and put the data in right when they’re in the middle of an operation at 3am.
And that’s the reality of policing and all areas of the emergency services. She makes the important point that the data will matter further down the line. How do you impress on the officer involved that data quality is important when there are so many priorities at the time? She and other speakers in our webinar majored on the need for engagement, advocacy and leadership with a clear message that data has to link to the service’s business strategy.
“This is not Tesco Clubcard,” says Aimee with some humour. The broad point about incentives, what happens with data, and how it has an impact later down the line is an important one. Understanding why the data one officer provides can assist the wider organisation is not confined to police and is certainly the case in fire, with the data collected in the Incident Recording System aiding later fire prevention work.
We talk about the Angiolini Report which was published last month and explored how a serving Met Police officer could have remained employed and able to murder Sarah Everard. Aimee says storifying – attaching stories to data – helps officers to understand how important it is to have quality data.
“The Angiolini Report is really powerful for policing. If someone had done a Police National Database check properly and entered his vehicle registration number plate into the system and linked it to the last time it was in the system, we could have caught Wayne Couzens earlier. The outcome for Sarah Everard could have been very different.”
Aimee Smith.
Kate Boyle is Head of Data Services for the Police Digital Service. She says, “The power of good when it comes to data in any organisation is immense. The insights of sharing across public bodies can be hugely powerful.” The risk of sharing data is outweighed by the outcomes: the emergency services need to bring datasets together for the good of society.
Aimee expands on this point. “Police and health need to share data faster, better, quicker. The more we join our datasets together, we more we can smooth out the bias and get better results.” She says that budgets and leadership affect innovation as it can take time to see the results but that doesn’t always fit with electoral cycles.
Kate and Aimee are members of Women in Data. Kate uses women’s safety as an example of how having consistent standards are critical to data sharing across the public sector. “I think we need as little as ten fields of data consistently used across the public sector. That’s where the vulnerability sits and where the money should be focused.” She sees the need to have a cross sector body to have these types of conversations. Aimee says the appetite is there but it’s early days.
The webinar conversation touches on volumes of data and it’s clear that there is no need to collect more data. Fire and police are awash with data. The critical issue is skills and having staff who know how to use data and manage it. The PSNI data breach is clearly still raw here.
So if the emergency services can sort out the data quality, have staff with great data skills because when they enter the service at whatever level they get the right inputs and see it as a skill akin to using any technology, then does that mean they are ready to adopt new innovation and enter the world of artificial intelligence?
Kate is clear that machine learning is the starting point. Getting machines to take the drudgery out of repetitive tasks, such as data entry, reduces costs and frees up staff to do tasks that have more meaning. Jo Mann heads up risk and intelligence for Humberside Fire and Rescue Service. She says that her service is already using machine learning for fire prevention and that the National Fire Chiefs Council is developing a model that all services can adopt.
The worry is of course that the machines will take over, but Aimee says that they are committed to always having a human in the loop. She adds that the public is generally supportive when they talk about, for example, facial recognition technology as long as the story – how it is applied – makes sense.
That hearts and minds point is one that applies equally to the police officers as much as the public but at the end of the day, is the money there to make communities safe and does it work best when it’s used to pay for technology innovations that involve artificial intelligence?
Like many conversations about money in public services, the point always returns to the need for certainty and that means three year funding settlements that enable public services like fire and police to commit to innovation and see it through.
In this webinar, the speakers were asked to provide advice about how to address the issues and while there was a consensus around getting data quality right and mapping activity to business outcomes, the need to find advocates in unusual places triumphs. The need to get data infrastructure right doesn’t lie just with the data analysts but with with cheerleaders: locate them and the solution will be closer to hand.
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To hear the conversation in full, watch the Emergency Services Times webinar, Data conversations: why a blue light AI future needs a strong data infrastructure on catch up.
