Talking 5 with JES member Chorus Intelligence

In this series, techUK's Fran Richiusa, Junior Programme Manager on our Justice and Emergency Services Programme, interviews a member or stakeholder active in the Justice and Emergency Services space, exploring their background and aspirations for the sector's future through technology.

Today, we talked to Scott Orton, Head of UK for Chorus Intelligence, about his aspirations for the policing sector.

Could you tell me more about you, your career and how you got to this position today?

My career has always involved data. I’m an analyst by background and spent eight years with Leicestershire Police and the East Midlands Special Operations Unit using predominantly cell site analysis to aid investigations.

I arrived at Chorus Intelligence nearly ten years ago. I first came across Chorus as an analyst, poring over spreadsheets of call data in missing persons cases or murder investigations.

My force was trialling a new software - Chorus Analyse - the first iteration of what’s on offer now.

It was a software product that cleaned call data records, a job analyst was doing manually at the time.

When the opportunity presented itself to join Chorus in 2016, I took it. I could see the product’s potential and wanted to use my experience to develop the software further.

Since then, the software has developed but so has the society it operates in. Data is more important than ever - there is more of it than ever before too.

The policing sector is grappling with a mix of structural, digital, and public‑confidence challenges that are all hitting at once.

Domestic abuse, sexual offences, online crime and fraud now make up a growing share of demand and are more complex and time‑consuming to investigate than many traditional volume crimes.

Almost every investigation now has a digital element, creating large volumes of communications data, device downloads, and online evidence that must be reviewed to evidential standards.

Data is scattered across multiple systems, forces, and external providers, making it hard to access, search, and share quickly enough for live investigations.

Forces struggle to process huge volumes of digital forensics material, traditional tools and workflows create long backlogs and risk critical evidence being missed.

National strategies recognise that without better use of data and technology, policing will not achieve the productivity and investigative improvements that are needed.

The above issues are all against a backdrop of workforce, skills and resource pressures.

Despite headline increases in officer numbers, many forces face shortages in experienced investigators and digital specialists, which limits their ability to handle complex, data‑heavy cases.

Recruitment and retention are under strain, with financial pressures and wellbeing issues making it harder to keep experienced officers and staff.

Budgets are tight, so forces are expected to do more with less while also investing in new capabilities and meeting rising public expectations.

Public trust is also low. High‑profile failures and scandals have damaged confidence in policing, making legitimacy a central challenge for chiefs and government alike.

Forces are under intense scrutiny to improve their response to violence against women and girls, hate crime, and serious youth violence, and to demonstrate fairness and consistency in their use of powers.

And another key consideration is the wider law enforcement landscape. Cross‑border criminality like county lines, online exploitation, cybercrime, demand joined‑up working, yet data sharing between units, forces, and partners is often slow, manual, and siloed.

Legacy systems and inconsistent standards make it difficult to build a single, coherent intelligence picture across local, regional, and national levels.

What is the greatest opportunity for policing when it comes to digital and technology?

The good news is that although there are challenges - they are recognised and acknowledged by those in law enforcement and government. Which in turn means almost all of them present opportunities for innovation and improvement.

Turning policing’s fragmented digital estate into a genuinely connected, data‑driven intelligence layer that every officer and staff member can draw on in real time is possible.

The Police Reform white paper recognises the potential that modern technology possesses in both solving and preventing crime.

It also recognises that, today, policing radically under‑utilises technology and data, with forces spending too much time reacting to crime after the fact rather than using data to prevent it.

The biggest opportunity, therefore, is to build interoperable, cloud‑based platforms that join up local, regional and national data and make high‑quality analytics, AI and digital tools available consistently across forces.

In practice, this looks like a single digital investigation environment where communications data, device downloads, crime and intelligence records, and open‑source material can be cleansed, searched and visualised together, instead of sitting in separate systems.

Self-serve tools that allow investigators, frontline officers and specialists to access and interpret data themselves, reducing bottlenecks around small digital forensics and analyst teams.

Federated search and cross‑case analysis across forces, so that entities (people, numbers, devices, locations) can be checked against historic and live investigations in seconds, supporting prevention, deconfliction and safeguarding.

The future of digital investigation is a cloud‑first, data‑driven service where police forces can prove a clear return on every pound spent and use technology to deliver more outcomes and in turn a safer society.

Demand is rising faster than budgets or headcount, so the only sustainable path is to automate low‑value work and democratise access to digital tools. That means frontline officers and investigators being able to self‑serve from integrated data, while specialists focus on the most complex cases, rather than routine data prep and admin.

Using tech to aid investigations means policing will become more efficient and effective and of course, that officers and staff can spend more time on the personal and human elements of policing that tech doesn’t offer.

National strategy and the Police Reform white paper both point to a nationally coordinated transition to the cloud, modern shared platforms and a new Police.AI centre as the backbone of reform. This means forces consuming SaaS capabilities rather than building bespoke systems, gaining scalability, security and faster access to innovation at lower total cost of ownership.

Government and NPCC are explicitly clear that technology must release millions of hours of officer and staff time, with examples already showing up to £8 of time saved for every £1 invested and the potential for 15 million hours a year to be freed nationally.

Future investment cases will therefore hinge on demonstrable productivity gains and measurable outcomes – faster investigations, higher detection, better safeguarding, safer society.

Justice and Emergency Services Programme activities

The techUK Justice and Emergency Services Programme represents tech firms operating in the public safety, criminal justice, and blue light markets. We create strong relationships between members and public sector customers, encouraging industry engagement, and unlocking innovation. Visit the programme page here.