A force for change: How policing can evolve to keep us safer

Today, police forces face challenges on multiple fronts: perpetually tight budgets, evolving and increasingly complex crime types, changing community needs and expectations, and exciting opportunities around emerging technologies and ways of working that require new skills and capabilities.

What’s the key to managing these effectively and becoming better prepared for the future? One answer lies with fully assessing both demands and resources, and finding ways to better align the two.

Achieving that alignment requires forces to better understand how their people work, how they use resources across different areas, where the greatest opportunities lie for improved efficiency and where they provide the greatest value to their communities. With this knowledge in hand, police forces can make the changes needed to become more agile and better equipped to deal with crime and protect the public.

Like many sectors, policing needs to transform. Doing so in the right way will benefit everyone – citizens, taxpayers, the wider community and the police themselves.

Changes in society, budgets and technologies

The world today is not the same one in which traditional policing models evolved. People live and work differently than before. Online and mobile technologies have been a big driver of those changes. Those same technologies have also contributed to new kinds of complex crimes, including digital fraud, online abuse and harassment and cybercrime.

A 2018 PwC study on ‘Policing in a Networked World’ reported double-digit (15%) growth in the number of complex crimes committed across England and Wales, along with a significant decline (10%) in traditional crimes such as theft, burglary and robbery. At the same time, some types of traditional crimes – gang violence and organised crime, for example – have taken on new characteristics, enabled by technology such as social media.

Adding to these pressures is the steady squeeze on police funding over the years. In England and Wales, overall police funding has declined by about 20% in real terms since 2010. While the Government's 2019 announcement of 20,000 new officers begins to redress this, the task to deliver this growth should not be underestimated and its net position isn’t guaranteed.

When police organisations are constrained by tight budgets, it becomes more challenging to meet the public’s expectations and keep communities safe. An Ipsos MORI survey in late 2017 found a growing public sentiment that the quality of local police services was declining: 25% expressed that view, compared to 18% in 2015.

Getting to new models of policing

To develop a new model of policing, any organisation first needs to understand where it stands today: current demands, available resources, pain points, efficiency levels, sources of value and more. Using that information, it can determine where it wants to go and how to better align its resources and demands to get there.

While doing this, police must keep the communities they serve at the heart of every decision.

Involving police personnel themselves is also important. For transformation to be effective and sustainable, it must have input and support from officers and staff on the front line. Change is more likely to be lasting when the workforce has a sense of ownership in the decisions made and the solutions implemented.

As they pursue transformation, police organisations also need to look for wider opportunities to collaborate with both the public and private sector. Doing this strengthens their societal ties. At the same time, this provides them with new insights and sources of support that can help them better serve their communities. This opens up the potential for innovative new programmes such as mobile apps that enable community members to support the police.

“It gives us the ability to make sure the operational side understands the impact of the resources that are put into the operations. From my perspective, it helps me understand the operational side more because, honestly, finance and demand go hand in hand.”

Phil Wellsassistant chief officer of Bedfordshire Police

How Bedfordshire Police is transforming

Bedfordshire Police saw many new opportunities open up after it took an in-depth look at its operations starting in the summer of 2018. Part rural and part urban, the Bedfordshire community was seeing a rising number of murders and other violent crimes, as well as fraud, both online and offline. Officers were struggling to keep up, and a budget tightened following the years of austerity made it difficult to simply add more resources.

The force set out to refocus its operational priorities and find savings that could be reinvested in other areas. It concentrated on the most complex activities that accounted for the bulk of the force’s budget – including the control room that handles 999 emergency and 101 non-emergency calls from the public.

This assessment involved various considerations: What types of calls could be resolved most quickly by asking callers a few more questions? Which would be best handled by someone elsewhere on the force with the right expertise? What strategies would help avoid backlogs so every phone call was handled quickly and effectively?

By answering these questions and streamlining processes in the control room, the force was able to identify different service levels that could both speed up phone responses and provide re-investment of up to £1.2m to other service areas. Reorganising criminal investigation structures highlighted that up to £600,000 of savings could also be realised, while addressing inefficiencies in how the intelligence function operates also had the potential to create £500,000 in cost savings.

In all, examining processes across the targeted spending areas showed, depending upon the service levels chosen by the force, that up to £7m of savings could be generated. This let the force direct much-needed funding toward a number of priorities, including additional community police officers and a new team focused on reducing gang activity and knife violence in the north of the county. And it put the organisation’s financial situation on a much more stable footing.

“Almost every organisation right now is trying to do more with less, whether they are responding to disruption or increased competition in their industry or because they are simply trying to keep going in the face of significant economic challenges and budget cuts. For the police forces we’re working with, such as Bedfordshire, that challenge means continuing with the incredibly important work they do, while looking for whatever efficiencies can be found to direct budget and resource where it’s needed most, to protect the public, combat crime and build stronger ties and trust with the community.”

Andy NewshamPartner, PwC UK

The role of technology

Any transformation programme inevitably includes new technology. In an ever-more networked and digital world, police need up-to-date tools to work effectively and meet the public’s expectations. They also need appropriate technology and data skills, which require strategic training and hiring initiatives.

New models for police training and hiring are vital for dealing with increasingly complex types of crimes, many of which now have online or digital components. Beyond this, they’re needed to ensure police forces better reflect the diverse makeup of the communities they serve.

When they’re equipped with the proper tools and skills, police forces can work more effectively and provide more responsive services to their communities. And when they have diverse and well-trained workforces, they’re better able to understand and communicate with everybody they serve. This helps to build the public’s confidence in their local police force and paves the way for greater community support, participation and collaboration in police efforts.

The need for cultural change

At the heart of all the changes needed for a new model of policing is culture. Changing police culture is crucial for meeting the safety needs and expectations of modern communities. But changing culture in lasting and sustainable ways isn’t easy: it requires buy-in from officers and staff across the organisation.

How can police organisations win such support from their workforces? It begins by recognising that personnel often feel overworked and under-resourced. It requires making it clear that change is needed not because they’re doing their jobs badly, but because change will make their work easier and more effective.

From this starting point, organisations must then involve people on the ground in all transformation efforts. This means talking about how they work, and where they see the greatest need for change. It means objectively examining current practices and policies, and having frank discussions about alternatives that might work better. And it means looking for models and best practices from other organisations that have successfully dealt with similar challenges.

Bottom line: Safer, more confident communities

While the work of policing is unique in many ways, it’s like any other sector in that it needs to transform for a fast-changing, diverse, complex and increasingly digital world. By adapting culture, ways of working, skills and technologies accordingly, police can better match available resources to current demands and improve working practices. And that will enable them to serve and protect their communities – and build the public’s confidence in the work they do.

To discuss any of the themes raised in this article, get in touch.

Contact us

Andrew Newsham

Andrew Newsham

Partner, National Lead for Policing, PwC United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)7850 516169

Andy Key

Andy Key

Home, International and Business Affairs, PwC United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)7720 270761

Franzi Hasford

Franzi Hasford

Justice Lead, PwC United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)7483 407403

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