For policing to fully embrace the opportunities to make greater use of data-driven insights, the challenge of accessing the right skillset around data science has yet to be overcome at scale. While data science skills exist within academia, there are limited pathways to leverage them and then later support progression into employment.
During the Summer of 2023, the Office of Police’s Chief Scientific Adviser (OPCSA) launched a new initiative to test whether academic partnerships could provide access to students with the data science and analytical skills that policing needs, whilst enabling the students to solve real and pressing problems during their academic studies and create further opportunities for progression into policing careers.
The Data Science Summer School initiative was created with four key objectives:
Build closer relationships between local police forces and universities who specialise in post graduate Data and Computer Science Master's courses;
Raise awareness among master’s degree students to careers and opportunities in policing that they would otherwise have been unaware of;
Enable skills and experience to be transferred between the police and students; and
Provide students with real life policing challenges to tackle as part of their Masters’ dissertation.
An initial pilot was set up with Lancashire Police and the Data Science Institute at Lancaster University – with support from the Centre for Data and Analytics in Policing (CDAP) and industry engagement led by the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE). ACE brought together a team with a range of experience across Microsoft, the Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing and Principle one.
Principle One was selected to support the design of the pilot programme, coordinating activity across the partnership, drawing out the key operational challenges that Lancashire Police was experiencing and aligning these challenges to projects that would be suitable for students to tackle as part of their dissertations. Over the course of three workshops held at Lancaster University, we facilitated discussion around the enabling functions needed to support the pilot; what projects would be most suited to Data Science students – and of course how the students would be supported by the police SMEs throughout the projects.
We were able to draw on our own experience of managing data-centric projects in policing and the risks and issues most likely to occur. With the Summer School due to take place in the final months of the Master's course, there was limited scope for slippage and a broad range of prerequisites – from clearance and access to IT systems through to Data Protection Impact Assessments.
By the end of the third workshop, two operational projects had been identified, which had the appropriate level of complexity and the required volume of police data to support them.
Once the design for the pilot was in place and agreed, we then supported the stakeholder group throughout the planning and mobilisation; working with the academic and policing stakeholders to identify the prerequisites that were in place, review CVs and work round potential blockers and delays to ensure that everything was in place in time for the students, Matthew and Andreea, to get started in July.
To kick start the project, we were delighted to host the OPCSA and CDAP team in our offices in London, meeting both our own Data Scientists and the Metropolitan Police Digital Intelligence Team, who were kind enough to show the students how Data Science and Advanced Data Analytics was being utilised to tackle a range of operational challenges in London. This gave the students a good understanding of how effective data analysis can inform decision making in policing, both in an operational and strategic context – and afforded them access to a supportive team of Data Scientists within Principle One.
Fast forward through several months of hard work and a lot of data crunching, the pilot came to completion with the submission of Matthew and Andreea’s dissertations to the Data Science Institute at Lancaster University, with the findings also being shared with Lancashire Constabulary and OPCSA at the end of September.
For Lancashire Constabulary, the benefits were clear. They gained access to emerging data science talent to actively support them in tackling their challenges, applying new perspectives and ways of thinking to current operational challenges, laying the groundwork for a partnership with the university that continues to flourish and is already considering challenges next year.
For Lancaster University, the initiative has supported their mission to have a positive impact on their local community and generated unique learning experiences for their students. The students gained the opportunity of using real data to tackle problems in society. As well as giving them a better understanding of policing challenges, they can see tangible benefits in the work they have done and the recommendations they have made. This has led to interesting dissertations that stand out from the crowd and an understanding of data science career paths in policing.
Colin McLaughlin, the Engagement Lead for Lancaster University summed it up “By taking part in the programme, the students got to work on a project that helps to deliver real world solutions that benefit wider society. It provides insight into the challenges UK Policing are facing and how forces are addressing the issues with Data Science. It puts a fantastic differentiator onto their CV to make them stand out from other graduates and opened their eyes to a range of opportunities within law enforcement that they were not aware of beforehand.”
Finally, for Paul Taylor and his team at OPCSA, the pilot project is a starting point for delivering lasting value through addressing two key challenges – how to enable policing to gain more effective operational and strategic insight from the data resources they have access to and how to find the right skills to make it happen. Dylan Alldridge, OPCSA’s Head of Innovation and the project’s day to day sponsor reflected “The pilot project demonstrated that we are pushing against an open door when it comes to partnerships with universities who specialise in Data Science qualifications. With the outputs from the summer school projects now shared in force, the longer-term benefits from actioning these insights within Lancashire and beyond will be tracked over the next year in parallel with planning further academic collaborations – this year’s Data Science Summer School could be just the beginning.”
For the team at Principle One, we were proud to have played a key role in getting the pilot programme up and running. While the appetite was there across all organisations from the outset, our experience helped provide a blueprint for running the pilot, considering the critical path that each organisation needed to adhere to in hitting the key milestones to successfully onboard the students to complete their work within the academic year. This provides a template for next year and a model that can be used to deliver the Data Science Summer School across a broader range of forces and universities at scale.
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