Why better use of data is vital for police

This year’s HMICFRS State of Policing Report, published in September, raises several important issues that caught my attention. For those who haven't caught up yet, the report highlights the significant pressure forces continue to operate under, with growing demand and legacy systems limiting their ability to respond effectively.

The Inspectorate continue to emphasise that forces must move from simply responding to demand to being more proactive and efficient, enabled by better tools and insight. They also suggest that while resources are finite, many forces could achieve more with what they already have, creating opportunities to improve productivity.

A phrase often heard in policing and the wider public sector is “data rich, insight poor”, and whilst this is something of a cliché, it remains a systemic challenge. Personally, I’ve witnessed it in force control rooms, regional intelligence units, and executive meetings: huge volumes of data, scattered across disconnected systems, offering very little in the way of real-time insight.

We have more data than ever before…but too often, we can’t use it when or where it matters.

That has to change.

Whether we’re trying to improve response times, tackle serious crime, optimise resources, or improve public trust, data is the key. But unless we start treating it as a strategic asset and building transformation programmes around it, we’ll continue making decisions in the dark.

A familiar problem everywhere you look

During my time as Head of the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit (NWROCU), we had access to vast amounts of data from across the region: intelligence feeds, operational case data, HR systems, victim and safeguarding records, crime trends, and partner inputs. But it didn’t come together easily.

In practice, accessing and making sense of available data means jumping across multiple legacy systems and reconciling mismatches. The process often relies heavily on manual effort by analysts and researchers, who spend their time wrangling data rather than focusing on gaining insight and driving decision-making.

This wasn’t unique to us. Most forces, and many wider public sector bodies, face the same issue. Their data is:

fragmented across systems and departments.
locked away in legacy databases with poor accessibility.
unstructured or inconsistently categorised.
underused, not due to lack of willingness, but because of poor tools.

The impact? We delay decisions. We duplicate effort. We miss patterns. And crucially, we fail to turn potential intelligence into actionable insight.

The false comfort of "having the data"

It’s tempting to think that because we collect a lot of data, we’re doing well. But the reality is that data in isolation isn’t useful. It's only as valuable as the decisions it supports and the outcomes it improves. Without the right systems and culture, data becomes a burden rather than a benefit. It clogs systems, creates compliance risks, and causes frontline frustration when officers spend more time entering data than acting.

Being “data rich” means nothing if you're insight poor.

Why this matters now

This isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a strategic one. As public expectations grow and budgets tighten, public sector organisations are under pressure to be more:

evidence-based in how they prioritise resources.
accountable for their performance.
predictive rather than reactive.
collaborative with partners, across organisational boundaries.

None of that is possible without better access to insight and the ability to turn raw data into decisions, actions, and improvements.

We’ve already seen how disruptive technologies can reshape policing when applied carefully and with the right safeguards, but unlocking their full value depends on the quality of the data underlying them.
In policing, it affects everything from intelligence tasking to safeguarding vulnerable individuals. In the wider public sector, it affects policy design, service targeting, and community trust.

From dashboards to decisions

So what does “better data use” mean in practice? It’s not about collecting more data. It’s about building the infrastructure, skills, and mindset to connect data sources, clean and trust the data you have, visualise it clearly, and act on what it’s telling you.

One of the most powerful steps we took at NWROCU was introducing a new analytics platform alongside our Salesforce implementation. It allowed us to build live, visual dashboards that gave senior leaders and operational teams a real-time picture of what was happening across the organisation.

Meetings became more focused. Tasking decisions were faster. Risks and gaps were easier to spot. Staff were enabled to fulfil their roles and realise their potential, and, collectively, we started asking better questions.

It wasn’t magic. It was simply the result of better tools, better design, and a better understanding of what our people actually needed.

Why the transformation should start here

Too often, data is treated as something you get to after the core systems are built. It's seen as phase two (or three, or four) of a broader digital improvement initiative.

The same principle applies to legacy modernisation, which I covered in my previous blog: start small, layer new capabilities on top of what works to prove value incrementally. If you build around your data, you:

design systems that make insight accessible by default.
break down silos early.
empower frontline users with the information they need.
enable leadership to monitor, adapt and plan more effectively,
create a culture that values evidence, transparency and learning.

The result can be a more effective use of our resources and an improvement in public service. With complex demand and limited resources, we need to ensure they are utilised as effectively as possible.

Cultural change is just as important

Fixing your data isn’t just about platforms or visualisation tools. It’s about changing how people think about information. That means:

training people to ask data-driven questions.
creating confidence in the numbers (through quality and governance).
making insight easy to access and understand.
moving away from data being “owned” by departments to being shared assets.

And I truly believe that partners like Infomentum focus not just on building the systems, but on helping teams adopt them meaningfully. Because without that cultural shift, even the best dashboard will sit unused.

As I described in my previous article, in policing especially, successful modernisation depends as much on trust as on technology - trust in the data, trust in the tools, and trust in the people delivering them.

Five questions leaders should be asking about their data

If you’re responsible for driving transformation in a public sector organisation, ask yourself these 5 questions:

Can we easily access the data we need to make daily operational decisions in one place?
Are frontline staff empowered with real-time insight, rather than chasing spreadsheets?
Do our systems talk to each other, or trap data in silos?
Do we trust our data enough to make strategic decisions from it?
Are we designing services based on evidence, or just intuition?

If the answer to any of those is “no” or “not really,” that’s your cue to act.

My final thoughts

Transformation in policing isn’t just about digitising forms or moving to the cloud. It’s about building smarter organisations - ones that learn, adapt, and improve constantly.

Data is the raw material of that change. But raw material isn’t enough. We need to refine it, connect it, and act on it. Being data-rich is only an advantage if we’re also insight-rich, and that means starting with better tools, better integration, and, most of all, better questions.

The organisations that succeed in the years ahead will be those that treat data not as an afterthought but as an asset. That’s where transformation begins.

Blog: Why better use of data is vital for police