Drilling down on crime?

At Essex Police, the chief constable has a computerised ‘dashboard’ that provides him with key data about how his force is doing in meeting its targets for crime reduction. Enterprise Information spoke to Daniel Demonakis, IT application administration manager at Essex Police.

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION (EI):

In recent years, UK police forces have faced a good deal of pressure from both the government and the public to set targets for tackling crime and demonstrate that these have been met. How has the way you capture and use crime data changed at Essex Police as a result?

Daniel Demonakis, Essex Police (DD):

In July 2005, a new chief constable, Roger Baker, was appointed at Essex Police. He was formerly deputy chief constable of North Yorkshire Police. He has a very different way of managing the force, compared to what we’ve been used to. He believes in raditional policing values and in getting officers out on the beat. At the same time, he is very statistically driven. He has an uncanny ability to look at a page of statistics and memorise them.

With that ability, it is hardly surprising that he wanted to use statistics to provide better insight into crimes and arrests. In particular, he wanted to know what crimes were most frequently recurring, in order to devise strategies to tackle them. And he wanted to be able to look at that information across the ten geographic divisions that operate within Essex Police. In that way, he would be able to see which types of crime are prevalent in a particular area and also be able to target specific officers within those divisions and see how they’re performing in terms of detection.

EI: That must place pressure on IT to supply the chief constable with a mass of information that presumably resides on a number of different systems?

DD: The Chief Constable made a big bang when he started. In his first week, he employed enough officers to get 600 extra arrests. There was also a massive campaign telling criminals that if you’re coming to Essex to commit a crime, bring a toothbrush, because you won’t be going home. When you start advertising stuff like that you need to be able to back it up with hard data.

Operation Days of Action, as it was called, was a campaign to increase the number of arrests made by Essex Police. The way Roger Baker wanted to run this was through a ‘chief constable’s dashboard’. What we put in place was a web front-end displaying all the different geographic divisions within Essex Police, displaying different crime types and the targets for those types of crime.

Red and green lights displayed on the system indicate where officers are hitting target and where they’re not. The chief constable can use that information to strategically decide when he has conversations with his divisional commanders what orders he should be giving. For example, he might tell them, "I want you to focus more on this," or "You’re doing well in this area – keep it up". So basically, he uses the system to communicate strategy on a daily basis.

EI: So where does the data that supplies the Chief Constable’s Dashboard come from?

DD: The vast majority of information comes from a system called NMIS [National Management Information System], which is supplied by PITO [the Police Information Technology Organisation]. [NIMS is an IT application that provides police forces and other agencies with consistent and comparable data to support improvements in the way forces work. The system takes data from a range of source systems in police forces and loads it into a separate data warehouse, from where it can be analysed and presented using tools from BI software supplier Business Objects.]

However, we had a number of issues with NIMS. It was given to us as a tool to provide HMIC [Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary] reports and so on. Basically, it couldn’t always give us the data in the form that we wanted it. Sometimes, it failed – so we had no results the next morning. Because NIMS relies on getting source data out of databases and into our own warehouse-style server, the process sometimes overran and the figures weren’t available in the morning. Plus, there were some reports that NIMS simply could not produce that we felt we needed.

So we had to find another way to fulfil the IT requirements for this project. When you‘re a public sector organisation, you don’t tend to have huge budgets to just go out and buy something, so we had to look in-house for ideas. As it happened, we’d recently deployed a smaller scale Hummingbird system, so we chose Hummingbird BI to fill the gaps in information delivery that we didn’t have with NMIS. Also, if NMIS fails, Hummingbird BI now provides us with a back-up to it.

EI: So who ultimately made the decision to go with Hummingbird BI?

DD: It was a collective decision made between IT and the officer support department. Obviously, they gave us their initial requirements and IT went away and came up with a strategy to meet them. But there were a number of people around the table.

We were already using Business Objects, Crystal Decisions [now owned by Business Objects] and Hummingbird within the force. So we took a look at all three and worked out which could fulfil the requirements the best – and that was Hummingbird. There were several reasons for that. In the early days of the project, we were trying to get data out of the main database and into the web front end that we had constructed. More than that, we were trying to get it into the web front-end in the right format.

That meant that someone had to take the data out of the system and play with it in Excel in order to present it in the correct format to the dashboard. They were spending around three and a half hours to do this every day. We went with Hummingbird because the company has the ability to do data extracts and represent that data in the correct format automatically. So we immediately saved one person spending three and a half hours every day, which over the course of a year, becomes quite a cost saving in itself.

EI: What have been the overall benefits of the project?

DD: The chief constable Roger Baker can now view the dashboard over our intranet. In fact, it’s actually available to anyone in the force. We have a ‘management information gateway’ – basically a web interface – that shows how we’re performing against particular force objectives, and there’s a link off of that to the chief constable’s dashboard. Anyone can see it, so everyone shares a joint responsibility to target the areas that are red. We’ve been very impressed by the ease of use of the new system – it’s a very simple piece of software. All the people that are using it – who need to change reports, for example, or who want data on different types of crime to be reported on – find it very easy to change. Whereas, with other packages, that might be harder. With Business Objects, for example, what constitutes an object can sometimes be confusing and unless you have quite good Business Objects expertise in-house, that can be difficult. Our training overhead for Hummingbird is far lower.

EI: Has that enabled you to use the system in capacities other than the chief constable’s dashboard, then?

DD: One thing we thought of was that, with the data maps and everything that we had constructed for the chief commander’s dashboard, it would be nice if we could take it further. For example, we thought it would be great if, once the chief constable and divisional commander had had their daily conversation, the divisional commander could also access the data in order to direct ‘bobbies on the beat’.

Then they could tell them, "These are the routes you’ll be taking and these are the sorts of crime you need to be looking out for on your route and investigate". In essence, it made sense to enable them to run their own analysis at their own, divisional level.

Also we wanted to extend the system to the Police officer level. Police officers are not always the most prolific users of new technology so we needed something that was easy to use and that that would enable them to drill down further, beyond a divisional picture, to their own beat; to enable them to take a look and decide what they should do in response. So that’s two things we’ve done.

Another idea we came up with was, that with all the work we’d done, we could probably assist the public in getting information as well. What happens now is that, as part of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme, local Neighbourhood Watch leaders can come in to local police stations, where we have specially-secured machines on which they can run a set of pre-defined business intelligence reports. As a result, if a crime of a particular type has gone up in their area, they can alert other members of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme and make sure that they know to keep a look out for each other and for particular crimes.

EI: What can you tell us about the architecture of the system and how long it took to build?

DD: Well, NMIS can provide some management reports, mostly HMIC reports, but these give a consolidated, overall view of data, so the rest of the links we built from scratch. Hummingbird BI fulfils most of the functions that NMIS does not and the rest of the architecture was an in-house web design project. It did not take long to get up and running, either. The initial implementation was done in a couple of weeks. There then followed a one month refining process, where we automated certain processes (such as converting data to the right format in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) so that they didn’t need to rely on human intervention. We did most of this work ourselves, although Hummingbird came into help set up the web clients. Since then, we’ve upgraded the system and we did that ourselves, too.

EI: A couple of weeks is a very short implementation time. Can you explain how it was done so speedily?

DD: That was one of the main reasons we chose Hummingbird – we could get it in and working quickly. And when you haven’t got a large number of management reports to convert into a system, there tends not to be too much work to do. What we found was that within a short amount of time, lots of employees had written lots of queries for the system and were sharing those queries within different areas of the force.

We were also able to use our own resources to provide training, which was one of the big issues for us. With NMIS, we had to send users out on a special Business Objects training course. However, with Hummingbird, we only had to have a few key people trained, and then they could just spend some time with their peers in the office, showing each other how to use the system – and we could simply leave it at that.

EI: How has the system been received?

DD: Users have been very positive about the system, because they need to get crime and arrest data as quickly and as easily as possible. In addition, a number of forces have recently asked us about how and where we use the business intelligence technology, and we’ve shown them the chief constable’s dashboard. They’ve shown great interest in the application.