Imagine this: A police team is called to a disturbance. They need background on the individuals involved, but it’s not available in the field. So they make a call to the police station, where the administrative staff logs onto the local network to research the information.

Everyone involved works as fast as possible, but there is a time lapse where officers are left handling a situation without critical data. And that information could make the difference between a successful mediation or an escalation of violence.

“The more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions,” said Helen Davis (pictured, right), senior director, cloud platform services, and assistant director for IT and digital at West Midlands Police in the United Kingdom. 

Davis and Matthew Pound (pictured, left), associate director for public sector technology delivery at Accenture plc, spoke with Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit. They discussed how the West Midlands Police Data-Driven Insights initiative has transformed operations for the police force. (* Disclosure below.)

Legacy IT slows down police operations

Five years ago, the West Midlands Police, which is the second-largest police force in the U.K. after metropolitan London, were fighting crime with outdated legacy systems and disparate data sources with no centralized method of discovery.

“If [officers] needed to check an address or check details of an individual, they would either have to go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer [or] make a call back to a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions, and either wait for the answer or wait for a callback,” Davis explained.

As an information technology professional, Davis knew there was a better way for the force to handle its extensive data resources. But as a publicly funded statutory authority, procuring a partner for digital transformation required compliance with rules and regulations, as well as complete transparency in the process.

Accenture helps West Midlands Police leverage the AWS cloud

“Co-creating solutions together” is how Pound describes the relationship between West Midlands Police and Accenture. “There’s no point just turning up with what we think is the right answer,” he said. ”We try to collectively work through the issues that the force is seeing and the outcomes they’re looking to achieve.”

When it came to choosing a cloud platform to support secure, fast search, analysis and disaster recovery for the force’s billions of police records, Amazon Web Services Inc. ticked all the boxes, according to Davis.

The pilot for the Data-Driven Insights program was very successful, and a rapid rollout led to a transformation in how the West Midlands police operated, according to Davis. “It went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do clever whizzbang things to every officer in the force being able to access that level of data at their fingertips,” she said.

The force has calculated that it has received productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time law enforcement agents since the initiative went into effect. Officers have confidence in the accuracy and security of the data they search and receive responses instantly rather than the minutes or hours it used to take.

“It’s making officers more efficient, and it’s also making them safer,” Davis stated. “The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend out with the public.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit. Neither Accenture LLP, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE