Criminals don’t operate within regional borders, but traditional UK policing does. Until that changes, there will always be missing links in the fight against cross-border crime – with slow and patchy exchange of data and weak national coordination giving criminals a perpetual advantage.
In an effort to create a more united national policing effort, the UK government recently announced that it will be using AI to create interactive crime maps. The Concentration of Crime Data Challenge aims to integrate data from police, councils and social services, including criminal records, previous incident locations and behavioural patterns of known offenders, to track the distribution of criminal activity – aiding the targeting of resources. “Our police officers are at their best when they join up to prevent crime rather than react to it,” said then-Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle during a visit to the Met Police in August.
But we need more than a series of isolated projects to make policing as agile as the criminals, particularly in a world where borderless crimes, including digital fraud, ransomware attacks and online harassment, represent an ever-growing share of offences. Initiatives such as the introduction of Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs), the National Crime Unit, and the National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened national coordination in some fields; but in the use of digital technologies, our police forces are not moving as fast as their criminal counterparts.
The recently published National Policing Digital Strategy sets out a clear vision for federated technology, including shared platforms, common data environments, and interoperability by design. There are huge potential benefits of such an approach, with shared intelligence, common tooling, and real-time coordination saving taxpayers’ money, improving detection rates and cutting the numbers of victims of crime.
Yet progress is slow, and huge barriers remain to the exchange of information between England’s regional police forces. As explained in the Policing Productivity Review 2024: “The diversity in IT systems, challenges in attracting and retaining skills, the absence of clear legal frameworks and a 43-force structure can lead to fragmentations in development and implementation, that make realising the opportunity difficult.
“Successes found at force level are often not replicated nationally, or are rolled out slowly, and they focus on smaller ‘quick wins’ instead of anticipating the strategic opportunities for the service of tomorrow.”
Many of the obstacles here lie in incompatibilities between police forces’ IT systems and data assets, which make it difficult to use common systems or exchange information. Naming conventions and date formats vary from force to force, for example, creating inconsistencies that mitigate against building a reliable view of any single individual, let alone a national operation.
Then there’s the issue of data ownership. If a force copies data from a source system (a court injunction, for example) and updates it locally, it creates a new version of the data. That introduces the risk of inaccuracies; and where it’s unclear who’s responsible for maintaining the ‘correct’ record, resolving or even identifying those discrepancies is complex.
Such challenges have hampered progress to date, preventing the integration of digital systems and weakening officers’ trust in other forces’ datasets.
Zooming out, similar issues foster huge inefficiencies and missed opportunities across the wider criminal justice system – with the courts, prisons, probation officers, social services, police and other public servants struggling to coordinate casework, organisational management and citizen communications across an atomised, fragmented digital landscape.
In the long term, tackling an issue of this scale demands wide-reaching digital reform to link up many of these mismatched and disconnected datasets using common data standards, shared digital platforms and pooled data assets.
While this level of reform would be a significant undertaking, it could ultimately generate huge rewards by improving coordination and collaboration across jurisdictions and organisational boundaries.
Meanwhile, though, emerging technologies can enable us to realise some of these opportunities without the need for complex systemic change and major cross-organisational reform programmes.
With their ability to process unstructured information, generative and agentic AI systems can bridge the compatibility gaps between datasets and IT systems – recognising different systems’ conventions and operating models, and providing interfaces that support the automated movement of information across system boundaries.
Such systems don’t provide a silver bullet but they can certainly produce significant improvements, hastening progress and reducing the scale of the overall challenge.
These AI systems must be carefully designed, of course, operating under close supervision from staff who understand their operations and potential pitfalls. Data errors – whether humans or AI technologies are responsible – can have huge repercussions in the field of criminal justice, and technologies require expert development, skilled handling and strong governance.
With the risks addressed, however, these capabilities present enormous opportunities to save public servants’ time – freeing them up to focus on the tasks that only people can accomplish, and much improving productivity and outcomes across policing and criminal justice.
Ultimately, experts argue, wider reform of our policing system is required to equip the forces of law and order with the tools to tackle those of chaos and criminality. In a letter to The Guardian, Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley recently called for the creation of police ‘mega forces’: the current structure of 43 county forces has not “been fit for purpose for at least two decades,” he argued.
Yet people have been making similar points for at least that long, and reform does not appear imminent. While Scotland merged its seven forces into a single organisation more than a decade ago, there are major barriers to meaningful change in England: democratic accountability currently runs through Police and Crime Commissioners – who’ve been directly elected since 2012 – and there’s little sign that this government has the funds or political capital for a nationwide reform with uncertain short-term cash savings and the prospect of strong regional resistance.
Happily, there’s a way to realise many of the benefits of force mergers without incurring the accompanying costs or opposition.
In other fields of public service, service providers are retaining separate leadership and accountability structures while merging their IT departments and sharing digital tools: local authorities and NHS trusts have trodden this path for some years. Police forces, similarly, are beginning to bring their digital operations together – with various forces in England and Wales forming shared IT services to provide common hosting, procurement and frontline tools.
This agenda could be pursued much further and faster, merging forces’ IT departments at a regional level – and using AI tools to minimise the costs and structural reforms required – while retaining existing systems of accountability and corporate leadership.
The model of force specialisation – under which the Thames Valley police lead the way on tackling firearms, for example, while Dorset blazes a path on the training and use of dogs – could also be extended into the digital world. Where a force (or cluster of forces) is clearly ahead on an aspect of IT, such as digital forensics, online fraud or collaborative tools, they could be given responsibility for developing policies, platforms and procedures for use across the country.
While awaiting a long-distant national reform of policing, we can realise many of the opportunities by drawing on the fast-evolving capabilities of AI and bringing forces together in the digital space with policing-led, shared IT services at the regional and national levels.
That way, we can allow forces to retain the operational independence required to address local challenges, while equipping them with the agility, intelligence and collaborative tools to match those of their counterparts in the criminal world.
