Data powers precision policing in Sussex

At a glance

Continuing a longstanding partnership with Sussex Police, Eviden helped transform traditional methods into precision policing through advanced analytics, data science and intuitive visualizations.

Outcomes

Ability to pinpoint the most dangerous offenders
Strategic targeting of resources and interventions in near-real time
New ways to track workload and availability
New ways to identify risk of domestic abuse

The Client

Sussex Police serves East and West Sussex and the city of Brighton & Hove – an area of 3,780 km². Its resident population of 1.65 million grows significantly with millions of visitors, holidaymakers, students, seasonal workers and 46 million annual Gatwick Airport passengers. Officers, staff and volunteers work together to protect the community, catch criminals and deliver outstanding services.

We are proud to have worked with Sussex Police over the past 5 years delivering targeted advanced analytics and visualizations to the teams that need it. The outcomes speak for themselves.

Mathew Glass | Head of Data Management and Analytics, Eviden

The need for precision policing

Sussex Police focuses systematically on transforming community services in the most efficient manner possible. This includes providing those on the front line with relevant, accurate and timely information in easy-to-digest visualizations. Putting the best possible information in the hands of frontline officers and staff saves them time and helps to target resources most efficiently and effectively. This is what precision policing is about — taking a data-driven approach to focused police activity.

Why Eviden

With more than 3,000 data and analytics experts, Eviden has long partnerships across the police industry. We’ve helped multiple forces use their data more efficiently, improving business insights and operational processes. Our technology-agnostic approach to data management is grounded in extensive experience with hyperscaler platforms as well as legacy tools.

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 — which slows down management reporting.

In response, Sussex Police in the UK wanted to make better use of its data for both strategic reporting and operational decision-making. It wanted to create new performance dashboards that integrate disparate datasets and enable frontline officers to understand, interrogate and make use of its data.

New business intelligence

The challenge for any police force, however, is that specialist data science and business intelligence expertise is needed to turn data into analytics for use by people who aren’t data specialists. At the same time, cultural change and adjustments to ways of working are required to embed real-time analytics into organizational 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 their own future reporting.

Following the proof of concept, Sussex Police has worked with Eviden to expand the portfolio of analytics with visualizations of vulnerability, violence against women and girls, workload, efficiency, and criminal justice.

The team’s first task was to ensure that the right datasets were accessible and identify where data would come from, how to get it and how often to refresh it. Then, the team created two dashboards. One shows a complete picture of demand across the force. The other interrogates and explores use of the force’s contact center.

For the first time, Sussex Police could see huge amounts of information and statistics about demand presented in an easy-to-understand format. The newly visualized statistics and views revealed trends and patterns, such as:

Types of demand
Crimes recorded and investigated
Outcomes of different types of demand and crime
Encounters with individual suspects, offenders and victims

Unprecedented visibility

Since then, use of business intelligence has been accelerated and scaled to provide a window on all aspects of Sussex Police operations. Reports in the new system have been viewed by more than 90% of Sussex Police officers and two-thirds of police staff, totaling around 1,400 views per day. Such unprecedented visibility of data enables frontline officers and back-office staff to focus and plan their activities and resources in a new way.

Police officers use interactive dashboards that pull together multiple datasets for flexible visualization of performance-related information in near-real time. The staff has also gained new skills to build and design future reporting. They can recognize 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 offenses. They can see which offenders have caused the most harm and which are the most vulnerable so that the best support can be put in place alongside partner agencies. This evidence-based view has produced some surprises. For instance, a pattern has emerged showing sexual offenders who were also previous victims.

Dramatically improved efficiency

This new business intelligence and analytics is also used for statutory reporting, performance management, and managing and supporting the workforce. All of these activities have been improved by better visibility of key performance indicators, personal and team achievements, and potential anomalies in recording data. The ability of officers and managers to use self-service analytics has dramatically improved how they consume information, reducing the time previously spent producing reports. Now they have a near-instant ability to visualize data.

Sussex Police is now positioned to take advantage of further advances in analytics and machine learning, as well as integrate more external datasets and data feeds such as weather data, public information, and sporting and event information. This will give the force more predictive capabilities; using data, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to predict and preempt demand, events and trends.

This project’s success earned the Chief Constable’s Commendation from Sussex Police for being a driving force in transforming their data analytics capabilities.