As part of our partnership with the Police Now National Graduate Leadership programme, Principle One has been hosting PC Fleur from the Metropolitan Police Service and PC Isobel from Sussex Police for a four-week secondment.
Both Isobel and Fleur work on neighbourhood teams in their respective forces working on long-term problem-solving projects concerning issues facing the local community. In 2019, Fleur executed five successful drug warrants followed by four full closure orders on the properties targeted, a project for which she received the Borough Commander's Commendation.
In their first week with Principle One, we put Fleur and Isobel through a short business analysis bootcamp; they learned a new set of techniques to rapidly understand user motivations, document business scenarios, create user personae and journeys. This helped them (and us) understand how front line officers could use technology more effectively, and to identify and break down barriers to change.
The first problem they tackled was to support an internal Principle One project around the problem of reporting hate crime at sporting events. We wanted to see how technology could be used to provide a simple, discreet way of reporting hate crime in the middle of a football match. This work involved Fleur and Isobel helping us to create a problem statement and set of functional requirements to run a coding workshop with our partner, Coding Black Females, to develop a chatbot that could be run on a smartphone make it easier to report incidents as they were happening.
The next challenge that our secondees faced was to bring to life how front line officers could exploit different data sources as part of a complex investigation. Drawing on their own experiences and problems they have faced in investigations, they developed a user story following a county lines murder investigation and worked with us to explore how using technology available on the cloud could support the investigation. The scenarios they've developed will drive innovation projects later in the year as well as feeding into our intern and graduate training programme.
Fleur and Isobel have had the opportunity to see a different side to policing and see how we as a company are working to make both front line officer experiences and complex investigations easier and more effective.
It's been hard to say who has got the most out of the four weeks - Fleur and Isobel have gained an understanding of how to apply systems thinking to policing problems and we've built a far greater insight into their day to day challenges.
Our partnership with Police Now gives us a unique insight into the challenges officers face and how we may be able to develop capability to help address these. We already knew that the culture that Police Now has encouraged meant that its participants would be well equipped to put forward new ideas and challenge established ways of working, and we were blown away by just how much Fleur and Isobel contributed within such a short period.
We are already missing our first secondees and can't wait to host a second secondment later in the year!