Police reform must turn innovation into better policing

It’s absolutely fair to say there is no shortage of ambition in policing. Across the service, teams are finding new ways to use science, technology and data to protect the public, support victims and stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated criminal threats.

The challenge now is turning that innovation into lasting reform.

For me, the starting point is simple. Whenever we consider change in policing, we should ask: are we making people safer? And are we making them feel safer?

Every change we make and every pound we spend should ultimately help our officers, staff and volunteers achieve one or both of those things.

Looking at the challenges we’re facing as a service, I’m not sure any of us can say that hand on heart, our teams are properly equipped to do that.

While there is fantastic work taking place in the advanced tech space – far too often, we hear of frontline frustration at the issues caused by legacy tech that is unreliable, non-user friendly and quite frankly – holding our teams back.

We all know that needs to change and we all know if it was simple we’d have done it already, but I firmly believe we are at a point in time where the appetite and opportunity for change is equal to the need.

Two tests for police reform

There is a great deal of discussion about reform, but we need clear tests against which we can measure progress.

The first is our commitment to communities: to rebuild confidence in policing. That means reducing crime and disorder in every neighbourhood, protecting the UK from new and emerging threats and raising standards across the service.

The second is our commitment to our people: to modernise the service they work in. We need to give our workforce better technology to fight crime, simplify the way they work and improve their safety and wellbeing.

Innovation matters not because it is new, but because of what it allows policing to achieve for its workforce and the public.

Turning innovation into action

We are already seeing the potential.

Traditionally, an investigator tackling child sexual exploitation would have to manually process millions of digital messages across multiple devices, apps and networks to get the information needed to safeguard those at risk of harm. Led by the National Data and Analytics Office, Prometheus helps investigators to threat-triage those conversations and identify which require urgent attention.

During its pilot, work that would previously have taken days was completed in less than half an hour – time which was spent far more effectively – not least with the identification of additional offenders and the proactive safeguarding of victims who were not known to police – or receiving support or intervention.

That tool has now been made available to all forces.

Elsewhere, Digital Public Contact is exploring the use of AI for post-call analysis in force control rooms, helping teams identify intelligence, vulnerability and operational insight that might otherwise remain locked within audio recordings.

And Drone as First Responder, led by the NPCC Drones Portfolio, is already live in six police forces, with more than 700 deployments a month. It can give teams a real-time view of incidents, gather evidential footage and help ensure the right resources are sent to the right place – every time.

Advances in forensics are opening up further opportunities. Forces are using 3D scanning to create detailed digital reconstructions of crime scenes, while research is examining whether microbial traces could potentially help establish links between people, objects and locations where fingerprints or DNA are absent or limited.

These are very different innovations, but they have something important in common: they have the potential to help our people use their time, information and expertise more effectively, and all for the benefit of public safety.

Technology must strengthen public trust

There is another important test. Innovation must not only improve our capabilities, it must support legitimacy and public confidence.

I am ready is a strong example.

Developed under Operation Beaconport and led by Hydrant, this portal supports victims and survivors of group-based and wider child sexual abuse and exploitation who have received a No Further Action outcome.

Developed with victims and survivors, it takes a trauma-informed approach to helping people understand the review routes available to them and access information and specialist support. Since its launch, 37 reviews have been put forward to the Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel, compared with the usual figure of around one per month.

That is innovation built around the experience and needs of victims, and that matters enormously if we are serious about rebuilding confidence.

At the same time, policing must respond to the risks created by technology itself. AI-generated deepfakes, for example, present growing challenges around fraud, impersonation, misinformation and the verification of digital evidence.

We cannot afford to stand still while the technology available to criminals advances.

But there is a danger that, in our enthusiasm for advanced technology, we overlook something fundamental: innovation will only transform policing if the basic technology our people rely on every day works.

Our workforce needs IT that is reliable, intuitive and fit for purpose. Systems need to communicate with each other and operate across force boundaries. And we need to become much better at taking successful innovation and delivering it consistently at scale.

This matters even more when 44% of our people report feeling emotionally exhausted and 56% physically exhausted. Reform cannot simply add another layer of complexity to their working lives. It must make those lives better.

That requires sustainable investment and long-term commitment from government, but it also requires us as leaders to keep sight of why we are innovating in the first place.

The test is not how advanced our technology becomes.

It is whether that technology helps us create safer communities, rebuild public confidence and gives the quarter of a million people working across policing and law enforcement the tools and support they need to do their jobs well.

That should be the ambition for police reform, and the standard against which we judge our progress.