How Technology is Empowering Citizen Crime-Fighters in the UK
When it comes to crime-fighting, community engagement isn’t a new concept. In 1982 the first UK neighbourhood watch, called Homewatch, was established in Mollington, Cheshire by local Crime Prevention Officer Sergeant Grahame John Andrews. More structured neighbourhood watch groups sprung up in subsequent years, culminating in the establishment of the Neighbourhood Watch Network in 2007.
In addition to banding together to prevent crime, citizens have also aided in solving crimes over the years. With the advent of Crimestoppersin 1988, ordinary citizens could do their part to share information on crimes, all while maintaining anonymity. In fact, Crimestoppers has been credited with leading to over 140,000 arrests, thanks to its international appeals over the years.
Fast forward to today and protecting one's community is considered the responsibility of every citizen. Furthermore, communities are no longer just where we live, they're wherever we happen to be at any given time. Neighbourhood watches created to deter burglaries and vandalism have now also joined the fight against terrorism and mass public shootings. Citizens feel an unspoken responsibility to assist in keeping their neighbourhoods, schools, and public venues safe.
What's more, where earlier efforts at engaging citizens in crime-fighting were pretty low tech, now technology is playing a central role.
For example, surveillance cameras provide eyes on every street. If a crime is committed in public, there's a good chance that it has been captured by a camera. As importantly, it has been reported that approximately 90 percent of adults in the UK own a smartphone. That means, when incidents happen, someone is bound to snap a photo or video. Yet few people would be willing to surrender their mobile phone, even for a short time, so that evidence can be extracted by police.
Still, there are many methods available to the police to solicit information from citizens – information that may facilitate a prosecution or open a new line of enquiry. Of course, members of the public can present themselves at a police station. They can dial or text 101, or submit an online form. The approaches vary from police force to police force and appeal to appeal.
In recent years, some new apps have become available for evidence crowdsourcing. On the surface, they seem to make the process easier, but they have some serious shortcomings. Some of these apps are designed specifically for large-scale emergencies, making them less useful for other types of everyday investigative needs where crowdsourced evidence would be equally important. In addition, some require police forces to set up a new link and web page for each case, or work with an outside party to do so, slowing down the process of collecting evidence and getting it into the hands of detectives. Other methods of collecting videos and photos potentially strip evidence of timestamps and GPS data, leaving off helpful metadata.
Which begs the question – with the propensity for useful digital evidence coming from citizens growing by the day, shouldn’t there be an easier way for police to request and receive it?
A growing number of forces are taking advantage of innovative new technology (NiCE Investigate) to solicit and collect evidence from the public. Two forces that are trailblazers in this area are Merseyside Police and British Transport Police (BTP).
Using NiCE Investigate, Merseyside and BTP investigators can easily create public appeal pages that can be instantly shared on social media. Investigators can also post links on each force’s own website or send the links to online news sites for sharing with the public.
Officers can also send appeals out electronically to individuals who they’ve met during their enquiries, instead of trying to collect evidence in person. With one click a recipient can upload digital evidence, including pictures and video, directly into the NiCE Investigate portal, through a secure webpage link.
To date, Merseyside Police has used this innovative capability to conduct close to one hundred public appeals, for cases ranging from missing persons, assault, and burglary, to criminal damage and firearms discharge.
Meanwhile, the British Transport Police is looking to extend this appeals capability to Single Online Home, the national website for policing in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, to provide more opportunities for citizens to submit evidence.
Another force following suit is Nottinghamshire Police. Nottinghamshire’s Detective Chief Inspector Yvonne Rainford said, “This is a huge benefit to our officers, who can apply the time saved to other specialist pieces of work.”
The recouping of valuable resources has also been recognised by the UK’s Cleveland Police. Chief Inspector Chris Barker explained: “A further benefit has been a considerable saving of valuable police community support and neighbourhood officers’ time, as the time spent disseminating requests for information door-to-door during an investigation has been greatly reduced.”
Any videos uploaded through the portal are automatically transcoded, and along with other evidence, automatically placed into a digital case folder. Once in the digital folder, the evidence is immediately available to investigating officers to review, edit, redact, save and even share with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Officers at Nottinghamshire Police have said the ability to collect and share evidence more quickly means they can now remand more suspects while they’re in custody, because they can get evidence to the CPS much faster.
Nottinghamshire’s DCI Rainford says this feedback “is priceless because it means we are reducing risk to the victim and potential future victims.”
To learn more about these capabilities, click below:
