Policing doesn’t just have a people problem. It has a time problem

Policing Doesn’t Just Have a People Problem. It Has a Time Problem. 

Ask almost any police service what resource it needs more of, and one answer will usually appear: people.

Police services need more investigators. They need more analysts. They also need specialist skills.

Yet there is another resource in even shorter supply: time.

As a result, every hour an investigator spends manually processing information is an hour they cannot spend interviewing a suspect, developing intelligence, assessing evidence, or progressing an investigation.

As the amount of data linked to modern investigations grows, including the amount of paperwork, that difference is becoming more important.

More information does not automatically mean better investigations

Modern policing has access to a huge amount of information. This includes financial records, communications data, intelligence databases, and open-source information.

In theory, that should make investigations easier. However, in practice, it can create a different problem, as someone still has to process it.

As a result, investigators increasingly have to work through large volumes of information before they can answer the questions that actually matter.

The risk is that highly skilled investigators become highly skilled data managers, pushing their real expertise to the side.

We need to rethink how investigators spend their time

For example, getting more work done in policing can be a difficult subject.

Police work isn’t a production line, and investigations cannot simply be measured by how quickly tasks are completed. However, that doesn’t mean efficiency should be ignored.

Instead, the better question is: How much of an investigator’s working day actually needs an investigator’s skills?

Consider an experienced financial investigator manually restructuring transaction data, or an intelligence analyst repeatedly transferring information between systems. These tasks may be necessary, but do they really need to be done by hand?

For this reason, that difference will become more important for police services facing growing demand and limited resources.

Automation should remove administration, not judgement

At the same time, there is understandable caution around automation within policing.

Decisions can have serious consequences, evidence must be reliable, and processes need to be transparent and defensible.

However, automating a process does not have to mean automating a decision.

There is an important difference between asking technology to decide the outcome of an investigation and asking it to remove repeated work around that investigation.

Technology can:

• Structure information
• Process large datasets
• Spot patterns for further review
• Help show links between information
• Cut repeated work
• Help investigators find information more quickly

Ultimately, the judgement about what that information means can, and should, remain with the investigator.

The capacity inside existing teams

This leads to an important question for police leaders.

Before asking how many more investigators a police service needs, should we also ask how much investigation time is being used by inefficient processes?

Imagine if technology saves an investigator just three hours each week. Across one person, that may not sound like a big change, but across 20 investigators, it becomes 60 hours, and across a year, it becomes thousands of hours of investigation time returned to the organization.

Therefore, even small workflow improvements can have significant effects on daily work.

Give investigators their time back

The most valuable policing technologies of the next decade may not be those that promise to reinvent investigations completely. Instead, they may be the technologies that quietly remove friction.

For example, a process that once took three hours takes 30 minutes. As a result, information that was difficult to interpret becomes easier to understand, a relationship hidden among thousands of records becomes visible, and a report that required repetitive manual work becomes simpler to produce.

Ultimately, each improvement gives something valuable back to the organization: time.

In an environment where police services are being asked to manage more complex work with existing teams, that may be one of the most important resources technology can provide.

The objective shouldn’t be to take investigators out of investigations.

Instead, it should be to put more of the investigator’s time back into investigating.