LINCOLNSHIRE POLICE

Making data a frontline tool in the fight against crime

Lincolnshire Police cover one of the largest geographical areas in England and Wales supporting a population of 750,000 people. With around 2,000 employees the force continually works to ensure the county has the very best policing available, and it is actively focused on a sustained reduction in offending to help communities feel safe and protected from harm. With people at the heart of everything it does, the force prides itself on a workforce that is knowledgeable, confident, skilled, and well equipped for the job.

In support of the National Police Chief Council’s vision for more effective policing through the smarter use of technology, Lincolnshire Police initiated an ambitious data intelligence and business analytics project to support officers in their mainstream duties.

Operational Challenges
Modern policing accumulates huge amounts of data, and the processing and using of that information to maximum effect was being hampered by disparate and siloed systems that operated in isolation.

Says Kelly Rodgers, Head of Strategic Development at Lincolnshire Police: “We live in an information rich world, and as a modern police force, we collect vast amounts data on incidents, crimes, criminals and victims – and we were simply unable to maximise the use of that information to transform and improve our law enforcement services.”

With crime, incidents, missing persons, resourcing, and other data being stored on multiple systems the force knew they needed to unify and integrate systems, streamline processes, reduce administration time and enhance decision making.

Following extensive research with other forces, Lincolnshire Police asked their technology partner G4S to identify the right software platform for their requirements, and based on recommendations from previously successful police projects, G4S asked Cybit to help them. Qlik Sense was chosen as the base platform, and Cybit’s consultancy and professional services team started working to bring this transformational data convergence project to life.

As with all technology projects, it isn’t about the technology itself – it’s about the improvements technology makes to performance. Cybit has a proven track record of working directly with customers to install, develop, and tailor software platforms, like Qlik, to produce very specific and detailed end results for the customer.

Bringing it all together
Having successfully completed a similar project with Northumbria Police, Cybit knew that the success of the project would be determined by the positive difference made to day-to-day policing performance – and the first step was to explore and identify the essential project outcomes needed by Lincolnshire Police.

 “At the core of the project was a need to enable officers to make quicker and more informed decisions,” says Detective Chief Inspector and Project Leader, Lee St Quinton. “And rather than asking our busy performance department to interrogate systems for them, officers needed a quick, self-service way to find the all data and information they require to speed up crime solving and better serve the public. The base software is one thing – but we needed expert help to make it do exactly what we wanted, and in the way we wanted.”

An intelligent, easy to use ‘dashboard-based’ solution was developed to enable officers to see the unfolding ‘bigger picture’ across a number of key areas, with a system ability to instantly drill-down into the background data as required.

“Patterns in burglaries that would not have been immediately apparent over many months are now quickly identified”, continues Lee. “Incidents throughout the year with similar traits, timelines, and locations are now spotted and profiled, enabling officers to take immediate and pro-active action to stop the offenders”.

System development, tailoring, and knowledge transfer by Cybit has enabled smarter and quicker decisions to be made based on dynamic intelligence, heat-maps, and incident information on live and active priorities across the county – and the force is now maximising workforce productivity for the benefit of all.

Results and the Future
With the first phase of the project operational, Lincolnshire Police and the public are benefitting from direct transformational benefits:

• Victim updates have improved by 60% in line with the Victim Code of Practice (VCOP).
• Monitoring and management of officer workloads has reduced outstanding task numbers by six thousand.
• Risk management compliance has increased by around 10% to 99.5%.
• Outstanding suspect numbers have reduced by 5%.
• Supervisory input to investigations has improved by 59%.

All of which means the force has become more effective and officers are spending less time on administrative duties, and more time out and about in the field.

“One of the major benefits of working with Cybit was their realism, honesty, and ability to transfer their knowledge to our team” continues Kelly Rodgers. “Cybit would tell us immediately if we were asking for something that wasn’t possible, reducing delays and enabling the project moved forward at pace. They’ve been absolutely excellent at training and upskilling our in-house IT team too.”  

The solution provides intelligent analysis of officer workloads and priorities, enabling the monitoring and re-allocating of tasks to teams with available capacity.

“Team management and 121 preparation times have been dramatically improved across the force”, continues Lee St Quinton. “Levels of support to frontline policing, and the reduction of risks and vulnerabilities to both officers and the public have been major successes”.

Next in line for implementation is a new daily briefing system, tailored to each policing district and providing frontline teams with additional detailed information about vulnerable members of the public who are most at risk, utilising multi-agency risk assessment data. Crime overviews will better inform officers of incidents in their area and who’s causing the most harm to the community – enabling them to take speedy, remedial action; and officer briefings will be connected and integrated with existing tasking processes for maximum productivity and effectiveness.

Concludes Kelly Rodgers: “From the outset, the entire team at Cybit has done a great job for us. They’ve focused on what was important to us and they’ve put valuable data at the fingertips of the entire police force, enabling us to make speedy and informed decisions for the benefit of everyone.”

Request a Free Analytics Consultation

Get in touch today for a free call back to discuss how we can help you fulfil your reporting challenges and goals.

Request a Free Consultation