AI agents in policing are having surprising results

After just six months in operation, two police forces have found that using artificial intelligence to assist non-emergency calls is already reducing pressure on control rooms as demand grows.

Thames Valley Police along with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary have adopted Bobbi, an agentic AI tool that answers non-emergency calls by drawing on a ‘walled garden’ of content owned by these two forces. Chief Digital and Information Officer, Mike Lattanzio spoke about the impact this tool is having since its introduction on the forces’ websites in November last year.

“I think to say we’re pleased would be an understatement. It has been way better than we anticipated. We knew it would be effective, and it would add value. We didn’t realise to what extent of it.”

This is a rousing start to a conversation that looks at how police forces can get AI to do the legwork, deal with the things that computers do well but only if the set up is right and the approach is responsible. This starts with AI being used in a controlled environment and in this case, it’s the content owned by the forces and not a general scan of the web.

If you go on to the websites of the two forces (who share IT functions) you will be presented by a chat bot. The bot asks your name, what you want to know and returns answers. This is not new, it is not radical. So what difference is it making to the running of a large and busy police force? Bobbi is also in use in Humberside Police and its technology chief Scot Dunn talked about it in a recent episode of the For Every Response podcast.

Bobbi has had 16,000 interactions with the public over the last six months and, Mike says, just under half of them have ended up being referred on to a member of a control room team handling 101 calls. He applauds the amount of time that is saving but it is still, in its infancy, small beer as a force control room handles over 800k ‘contacts’ with the public in a single year.

There’s a volume metric to success, how many calls are dealt with by an AI rather than a human, but there are other ways to measure the success of this pilot and some have surprised Mike. He explains: ” What we’re finding is that people actively prefer to use this method of communication rather than picking up the phone.” For some people the call is about a sensitive matter or may be complex. “Members of the public know what has happened to them, but they’re not certain of what it means in terms of the law and whether a crime has been committed.”

Providing the public with a safe online space using an AI agent, providing impartial advice from a trusted source has been a “massive benefit” says Mike and has been much greater than Mike and his team anticipated. He also says that having this ‘channel of choice’ as he puts it, means that when a caller is in a situation where the perpetrator is still at the scene and they physically are not in a position to be able to pick up a phone and make a call, they have been able to use this facility.

Understanding risk factors in a call from the public is fundamental to a call handler’s training and role, so how does an AI agent do the same? “When we are configuring the agent, we configure it in a way to ask certain questions, and all of this is in exactly the same way as we train our human operators,” Mike responds.

“The chat agent will ask the right questions, it will interpret the information that is being given, and it will assess risk very well, and pass it on to a human as it needs to.”

He reinforces that Bobbi is a non-emergency facility, “and we’re very clear about that at the front end.” Despite that, he says there have been examples where people have made a call using Bobbi that otherwise, they would not have been in a position to make and in more than one instance, he says, the police have been dispatched and turned up at the scene with the perpetrator still on site who has then has been arrested.

The extent to which the introduction of an AI agent can tell a police force something about the needs of its local population is of interest to Mike. The insights from the questions of people who use Bobbi are valuable and he says they have barely scratched the surface of what is possible with this technology. Ironically, the force is using AI to monitor the use of Bobbi and provide those insights because to do it manually would take a long time – although he is quick to add that there are humans involved in this process too.

Looking ahead to see where these two forces go next with Bobbi, Mike says that they have been very thoughtful about how they promote the tool and they want to build the trust and confidence of the public in AI tools like this one to ensure its acceptance as a way to contact law enforcement.

It could end up being the communications tool of choice, he concludes, but really it’s a recognition that many people simply don’t want to pick up the phone and prefer the anonymity of an online interaction. With demand increasing on police control rooms, every little bit helps.

To learn more about how agentic AI is being used in the emergency services, join us at The Emergency Tech Show where the Welsh Ambulance Service is using Albot to respond to NHS 111 non-emergency calls. To view the full speaker programme, including our new conference Resilience 360, register here.