Source: United Kingdom National Police Chiefs Council
Additional investment in science and technology could mean an extra 41,000 hours of police time available every day across England and Wales to be reinvested in neighbourhood policing and preventing crime.
Police chiefs are calling for the government to allocate circa £220 million to science and technology per year over the three-year spending review period to scale up tested science and technology capabilities.
As police chiefs set out their strategy for use of data and digital technology over the next five years, they make the case for government investment to enable police to roll out technology that has been successfully trialled across England and Wales.
The independent Policing Productivity Review of forces in England and Wales reported examples of science and technology driving productivity. The Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser to Policing estimates that these projects saved 347,656 of workforce hours per year and led to direct savings of £8.2 million a year in costs. If they were scaled nationally, and similar gains were made in all 43 forces, potentially up to 15 million hours, worth £370m per year, could be saved and reallocated each year.
National Police Chiefs’ Council Chair Chief Constable Gavin Stephens said:
“A decade with very limited capital investment into policing has meant prioritising maintaining existing technology over innovation. The vast majority of police force technology budgets are spent on ageing systems and simply keeping the lights on. This has to change.
“Criminals are investing in technology to do harm; we need to invest to keep up and stop them.
“With government investment in the spending review, we are ready to roll out technology which could save millions of hours, finish investigations in days instead of months and keep pace with criminal advancements.
“Without investment, we will fall behind rather than become more productive. We will not be able to restore neighbourhood policing. Halving violence against women and girls and knife crime will become much harder to reach targets.”
A refreshed National Policing Digital Strategy 2025-2030 developed by NPCC, Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) working with Police Digital Service (PDS) has also been published today. It sets out police digital and data ambitions and the roadmap to achieving them. This supports the NPCC’s Science and Technology Strategy published in May 2023.
National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Lead for Digital, Data and Technology Chief Constable Rob Carden, said: “Over the last decade, digital technology and data and analytics have become integral to policing’s ability to deliver an effective and efficient service and policing will spend nearly £2 billion on it in the next financial year. Policing must change the way we approach data, digital and technology to ensure we invest in solutions which can be used nationally across all police forces.
“The National Policing Digital Strategy will provide the direction, purpose and roadmap necessary for forces to enable the changes required. Working towards common goals, which can be upscaled at pace nationally to ensure we are making the savings in time and money in order to help our officers catch criminals and protect the public using data, digital and technology in the most effective way.
“One of our key ambitions is to give local communities more convenient ways to get in touch with their local force through improving things such as websites and apps, whilst developing a range self-service digital engagement channels that anyone is able to use and access.
“Transparency, fairness and ethical standards will be at the heart of all we implement.”
Examples of investment:
- Roll out Live Face Recognition units. On average, throughout 2024, there were 60 arrests per month across the three forces currently using Live Facial Recognition, of which a quarter involved registered sex offenders. Live Facial Recognition reduces the time spent on investigations, ultimately meaning swifter justice.
- Roll out Rapid Video Response – a video call software that offers a discreet, quick and specialist police response to non-urgent reports of domestic abuse. Developed by Kent Police, it has led to a decrease in the average response time from 32 hours to just three minutes, and a 50% increase in arrests.
- Complete build of a new national digital forensics’ platform. Checking digital devices for evidence takes a lot of police time. A national digital forensics’ platform will help officers to process evidence on digital devices more quickly, return devices faster and make the process less intrusive for victims. This will help to address the current backlog of around 25,000 devices and keep pace with digital crime, which is growing 29 per cent annually.
- Enable the public to contact the police in the way that suits them best including adding services like AI-powered assistances and online case tracking, which in turn will reduce wait times for 101 or 999.
- Developing data and digital capability to catch offenders and protect victims. This includes creation of a national Data and Analytics Office, which will lead improvements in data quality, compliance and sharing across the criminal justice system. Continued investment in analytical capability will exploit this data, enabling, e.g. predictive tooling for multi-agency risk assessments and geo-spatial analyses to identify and address unsafe spaces. To date, this work has saved around £1m p.a. per force in productive time, by enabling efficient officer deployment, while early ANPR journey analysis has quadrupled drugs seizures.
- Funding a national Continuous Integrity Screening capability to provide ongoing detection of unacceptable behaviour from officers and staff and the removal of those who pose a risk.
- Expanding our regional centres for Robotic Process Automation. In the three regions where it is deployed, automation is securing a return on investment of £8 in time saving for every £1 spent, covering 150 different administrative and crime management processes in relation to crime management and admin processes. Its national deployment will ultimately reduce administrative burden on frontline officers.
- Roll out nationally video and text redaction tools, automatic translation capabilities, summarisation tooling, and new deepfake detection capabilities. Recent trials suggest these tools will offer significant time efficiencies and a better quality of service, with text redaction alone estimated to save around 1 million hours of workforce time, estimated at £16m a year.
- Fund the police service’s Aviation Pathway Programme will consider use of Unmanned Arial Systems (i.e., drones). in investigations, surveillance and, to emergency response; improving service and reducing costs.
Latest research from the University of Birmingham and University Sheffield has demonstrated a clear link to increased economic growth and prosperity from investment in policing. Investment in policing, including technology investment, can lead to reduced demand on other parts of the public sector, level the playing field for companies who have to absorb the costs of crime, and reduce the need for the public to spend money as a consequence of crime.
For example the relationship between house prices and crime reduction shows that each £1 invested in policing yields £4.17 in economic benefits. Based on this, a 10% increase in policing i.e. around £1.7bn per year, will generate £14.5 billion in net benefits over twelve years, equivalent to 0.5% of annual GDP. Find out more in Issue 2 of Policing Tomorrow.