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10 Mar 2023

Met Police Turnaround Plan: Industry Roundtable - Roundup

techUK was delighted to host Darren Scates, Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer at the Metropolitan Police (MPS), to provide an industry briefing of the institution's Turnaround Plan. The session covered, how the MPS will harness the power of digital technology and data, to provide a better service and deliver on the overarching mission of ‘More trust, Less Crime, High Standards'

Background to the Roadmap

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, launched the Met’s Turnaround Plan at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in January 2023. techUK, alongside other London leaders and stakeholders, joined the briefing to hear how the plan looks to refresh values with a particular focus on;

  • Delivering More Trust, Less Crime, High Standards, and doing so in a way that meets the public’s expectations, highlighting the importance of inputting the ideas and experiences of industry, policing, and citizens within the force’s Turnaround Plan of digital transformation.
  • London’s communities are ever-changing, and the Met must be more representative of those it serves. The situation we face is changing too, with traditional challenges accompanied by new, varied, and often digital forms of criminality.

 Included in the plan is a call to complete the MPS’s survey.

Scale of the challenge

Trust is the foundation upon which consent and legitimacy for policing are built. As such, less crime through a combination of activities, including proactively preventing crime, investigating crimes effectively, protecting vulnerable people and places, targeting high volume and high harm offenders, local problem solving, and more.
 

  • Via the Met Police’s digital reporting system, an online reporting system also used across 35 forces, citizens report crime digitally, contributing significantly to evolving the efficiency and intelligence of investigations. This is particularly important in considering the growing proliferation of online crime, including fraud and harassment.
  • The challenge exists to utilise preventative initiatives, working with local communities, cross-public services, and Community Support Officers to gain ‘up stream’ of potential risks of crime.
  • Ensuring transformation of Policing processes, including the national rollout of work smartphones, facilitating the usage of Officer designed Microsoft PowerApps.

Priorities

The Turnaround Plan outlines 9 priorities to improve policing activities in a variety of aspects, including capability to reduce crime, and ensure the MPS can deliver on More Trust, Less Crime, High Standards. They are a blend of medium-term priorities that will be delivered over the next two years, and longer-term changes which will initiate more fundamental transformation.

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Digital Data and Technology Priorities

The focus remains on the application of data and digital platforms/systems to ensure highest harm perpetrators are the priority. This also includes multi-agency data sharing, preventing offenses, improving investigation access to information, and bringing perpetrators to justice. These can all be enhanced by enabling cross-administration data flows.

  • Improving access to data and better data analysis will lead to a better force understanding of the historical social, economic, and behavioural context of perpetrators.
  • Modernising legacy tech infrastructure, ensuring this involves relevant suppliers, will improve the recording of crime but also how investigations and cases are progressed.
  • Application of AI/ML and data analytics to help officers to look at hours of CCTV; Significantly reducing investigation time. This also involves county lines; exporting perpetrators and key organised crime actors cross-region.
  • The Met Police has (one of) the largest suppliers of body-worn video in the world. Body-worn cameras enable officers to gather evidence, record incidents and can better protect officers via livestream functions.  
  • Building on the Met Police’s Microsoft PowerApps deployment (Met-specific designed applications to support staff and officers in their roles) introduces access to outside datasets and information for Officers and Analysis staff. A Popular App which Officers have found significant value has been the template messaging writer, saving templates for apps, reducing time, and improving service.

Data-Driven Delivery

Priority 8 of the Roadmap includes the design and implementation of a new data operating model, facilitating the data and information insight gathered in a way that benefits and interlinks with investigation processes.

  • Project Performance; Deliver a way of measuring and managing performance, creating a single version of the truth that will be used to inform performance decisions and track the metrics for successful outcomes. Regarding different Business Units, the importance of comparing KPI metrics.
  • Project Tasking; Enhance how the Met Police’s resources are tasked and coordinated to address performance challenges, including the unification of a tasking product that outlines threats, performance data, operational progress, and evaluations/impact of resource decisions.
  • Data Operating Model; Ensuring the required skills and approaches to collecting, using, and managing data to service all of the institution’s data and analytics needs in an ethical and legal way.
  • Project Insight and Innovation; Delivering insight and innovation products to predict and respond to crime, drive, and inform performance decisions.
  • Enterprise Data Platform; Build a platform that collates data and supports r analytics and insight capabilities.
  • Data Value Project; Making sure the Met Police know, and tracks, the value of the institution’s data, enabling better strategic and investment decisions.

Following the presentation from Darren Scates, attendees convened to provide a response to the Met Turnaround Plan’s Survey. Attendees were given an opportunity to share their thoughts, views and what they thought was missing from the plan. Responses are being captured by techUK both via the session and in written form. These responses are being shared with the Met Digital Team. If you have any questions or, want to understand how techUK is responding to the plan, please reach out using the details below. After the response has been submitted, techUK will be sharing the response with techUK members.

A link to the Turnaround Plan can be found here

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Georgie Morgan

Georgie Morgan

Head of Justice and Emergency Services, techUK

Robert Walker

Robert Walker

Programme Manager, Health and Social Care, techUK

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