Sussex Police harnessing data for precision policing

Sussex Police focuses systematically on transforming community services in the most efficient manner possible. This includes providing relevant, accurate and timely information in easy-to-digest visualisations, putting the best possible information in the hands of frontline officers and staff, saving them time and helping to target resources in the most efficient and effective way. This supports the delivery of focused, precision policing.

Turning analytics into a game-changer for policing 

Police forces hold vast volumes of data about all aspects of their operations including contacts with members of the public, crimes committed, policing incidents, investigations and so on. Held in separate databases, information is often hard to join up and management reports can be time-consuming to generate. As a result, it’s difficult to gain strategic or operational overview or insight. 

Sussex Police wanted to make better use of its data both for strategic reporting and for operational decision making. It wanted new performance dashboards that would integrate unconnected datasets and enable frontline officers to understand, interrogate and make use of its data. 

New business intelligence 

The challenge for any police force is that specialist data science and business intelligence expertise is needed to prepare data for use by people who are not data specialists. At the same time, cultural change and adjustments to ways of working are required to embed real-time analytics into organisational decision-making. That’s why the force commissioned Eviden to produce an initial set of live dashboards and upskill its staff to build and design future reporting.

Following a proof of concept, Sussex Police has worked with Eviden to expand the portfolio of analytics, with visualisations covering areas including vulnerability, violence against women and girls, workload, efficiency, and criminal justice among other areas. 

The team’s first task was to identify where required data would come from, that datasets were accessible, how to get them and how often data needed to be refreshed. Then, the team created a dashboard to gain a complete picture of demand across the force and a dashboard to interrogate and explore use of the force’s contact centre.

For the first time, the force could see huge amounts of information and statistics about demand, presented in an easy-to-understand format.

Visualised statistics and views revealed trends and patterns, including types of demand, crimes recorded and investigated, the different outcomes, and encounters with individual suspects, offenders and victims. 

Unprecedented visibility 

Since then, use of business intelligence and analytics has been accelerated and scaled to provide a window on all aspects of Sussex Police operations. Such unprecedented visibility of data enables frontline officers and back-office staff to focus and plan activities and resources in a new way. Police officers use interactive dashboards that combine multiple datasets for flexible visualisation of performance-related information in near real time. They can recognise interdependencies, compare and cross-reference scenarios, test hypotheses, and interrogate operational data to find answers to key questions. 

Officers can see the impacts on individual citizens and have greater visibility of people and families at risk of specific types of offences. They can see which offenders have caused most harm and which are the most vulnerable so that the best support can be put in place with partner agencies. This evidenced-based view has surfaced data to inform prioritisation and decisions; for instance, viewing sexual offenders via cumulative harm  and newly identifying offenders who are also victims. 

Dramatically improved efficiency 

This new business intelligence and analytics is also used for statutory reporting, performance management and managing and supporting the workforce, with improved visibility of key performance indicators, personal and team achievements and potential anomalies in recording data.

The ability for officers and managers to self-serve has dramatically improved how they consume information, eliminating the days and hours previously spent producing reports and replacing them with a near-instant ability to visualise information. 

Sussex Police is now positioned to take advantage of further advances in analytics and machine learning, as well as integrating more external datasets such as partnership data. his will give the force more predictive capabilities, using big data, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to predict and pre-empt demand, events and trends. 

 
The industry will once again be gathering at the NEC, Birmingham for The Emergency Services Show, co located with The Emergency Tech Show on 18-19 September, check out the full exhibitor list here. You can find Eviden in Hall 4, stand F100, part of the Microsoft Partner Pavilion.