PoliceBox CEO says Sir Thomas’s call to invest in more technology for officers should focus on improving data sharing between forces and agencies
Important according to Google magic. Click to teach vigilance Mail this conversation is not important.
In his annual assessment of policing in England & Wales, Sir Thomas Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, listed technology investment as a top priority for policing, calling for longer-term investment in technology such as body-worn video cameras, facial recognition and artificial intelligence.
In his address, Sir Thomas focused much of his criticism on the 45-force structure as being inappropriate to meet modern policing challenges such as county lines drug dealing and fraud. Simon Hall, CEO of the mobile policing app PoliceBox says Sir Thomas hit the nail on the head when he said “there is a need for the police to function as part of a single law enforcement system,” but Hall suggests we don’t necessarily have to scrap the structure to make policing more effective.
Hall comments, “A mobile and connected police force where data is seamlessly shared between officers, forces and all other related agencies can be achieved without scrapping the 43-force structure or existing ICT systems. With crime increasingly crossing county and even national borders, every force and every officer increasingly needs access to national databases to do their job effectively, yet most of them can barely access their own force’s databases when out of the station, let alone national ones. While it may be easy to blame the 43-force structure for the ‘data hoarding’ that occurs between forces, we don’t need to scrap the entire structure of UK policing to address this problem.”