It isn’t necessarily obvious how integration plays such a key role in enabling police forces to engage with their primary stakeholders (i.e. the public); however, at the heart of relevant, personalized engagement is data. And if data is the golden asset, integration is the mine that uncovers it and makes it available for consumption.
What is the problem UK police forces face regarding citizen engagement?
Public trust and confidence is critical. Policing is an essential service for society. It is important that, as with other sectors, policing processes and technologies adapt with changing societal needs and demands. The need for adaptation is particularly relevant with regard to citizen engagement, keeping people up to date proactively about an ongoing case or preventative work being done in a particular hotspot.
This is something police forces have struggled to implement and often, it’s seen as an officer or staff responsibility; with increasing workloads and crime complexity, there isn’t enough capacity to deliver the quality of service and engagement that is now expected.
However, the vast majority of dedicated officers and staff go to work every day and put others first, trying to provide the best service possible to anyone they engage with. Therefore, it is important to recognize that the issue of citizen engagement doesn’t sit solely with people or processes and how technology can be leveraged to ease the burden on officers and staff needs to be explored.
Like a lot of public sector organizations, police forces are required to capture and store a lot of data. Couple this with complex processes (solving a crime isn’t simple!) and you have a proliferation of applications and data. The problem of understanding and exposing this data to officers and staff manifests itself most severely when a force engages with the public:
- Multiple records for the same person
- Not all information on a person available to officers and staff at the point of engagement
- Majority of engagement has to be manually driven by Officers and Staff
There are some obvious risks associated with these inhibitors; when a member of the public interacts with the police, there is a responsibility for the force to continually assess risk based on new information received but also how this layers over time and builds out to a holistic risk profile. If this risk profile is not successfully created and disseminated to the right people at the right time then there is a likelihood that the wrong interventions are taken, or worse, no interventions are made at all.
In addition, the problem of risk management is compounded by repeat demand. Repeat demand that occurs because members of the public are not engaged through the life cycle of their case. Lack of updates also drives increased complaints and victim and witness attrition throughout the justice lifecycle (i.e. victims/witnesses not attending court).
Just rescheduling a single court date has significant cost implications given the number of stakeholders involved. A lack of engagement costs the justice system money but it also erodes public trust and confidence in the police service which can have wider ramifications for society.
Why hasn’t this been solved yet?
Each police force is different, they have autonomy over their technology choices, processes and how they manage people to deliver services to the public. However, there are some themes which appear prevalent at most police forces:
- Integration outsourcing: The majority of policing applications have been implemented with a suite of out-of-the-box integrations. These integrations and the functions they perform are baked into the application and owned by the vendor. This gives police forces little control if they want to extend an integration for another use case or into another application, which is typically a lengthy change process and an increased cost.
- Data strategy: All forces understand the importance of data. However, this doesn’t necessarily translate to a comprehensive data strategy, a strategy that encompasses data culture, quality, models, integration, analytics, governance, and alignment with overarching business objectives.
- Procurement: This is usually a protracted process to procure new technology for a police force, bound by red-tape and legislation. For many forces, it is often seen as easier and quicker to bring in more people than attempt to procure and deliver new technology. While people are absolutely crucial to the solution, it isn’t sustainable to continually bring in more bodies. Faster routes to market and an appetite to fail fast with incremental innovations need to be part of the toolkit.
How a strategic approach to integration can help
Salesforce and MuleSoft are working with several UK police forces to address the issue of citizen engagement. The diagram below is a reference architecture that is used to outline the components required to enable enhanced citizen engagement:
As the diagram indicates, the solution provides two engagement channels.
Portal:
Proactive engagement in the form of emails, text messages:
At the heart of enabling these engagement channels, which will reduce repeat calls, increase public trust and confidence and enable forces to better understand their victims, witnesses and the broader community, is data. In the integration and orchestration layer, MuleSoft exposes this data from existing systems of record. There are multiple benefits the integration and orchestration component provides by leveraging MuleSoft:
- Expedited delivery: The incumbent Command and Dispatch (CAD) and Record Management System (RMS) vendors at a force don’t need to build out any additional integration functionality in their applications. MuleSoft manages all of the required transformation, aggregation, and logic to interact with the application endpoints in whatever format (SOAP, FTP, SFTP, DB, and so on).
- De-coupled architecture: By wrapping the CAD, RMS and other application end-points with MuleSoft the force is able to define how it wants to expose access to those systems in the form of a RESTful API. Rather than each consumer being required to understand the native security, logic, protocols, error handling and data model of the application the interaction is brokered through a simple, easy to consume MuleSoft API that is easy to discover and manage as a product with a full lifecycle.
- The API network: See diagram below
As part of the citizen engagement delivery, an API network emerges, or a set of assets that can be reused. For future projects, police forces can now leverage their MuleSoft CAD and RMS (and other) APIs and reuse them to interact with systems of record. By exposing data and processes through easy to consume APIs that can be easily discovered, managed and governed the possibilities for how a force can innovate and deliver new outcomes exponentially increases
How does it work?
The solution is simple yet transformative. Business, digital, and IT personnel collaborate to:
- Define the citizen journey:
- What outbound proactive engagement should be sent; when, why what
- What self serve information can be exposed on the Portal
- Determine what data is required to enable the cCitizen journey
- Work with SMEs and IT to ascertain which systems that data is created, updated and mastered in
- Work with IT and vendors to design the most appropriate integration pattern for requisite systems (scheduled polling, queue based etc)
- Build out any logic, transformation, aggregation in the integration layer to ensure data is provided to the Salesforce components correctly formatted
- Build, test and run the solution!
Future use cases
Additional use cases become unlocked as the API network grows at a police force. Police can take a proactive stance to innovation, knowing that the data they need is now accessible. The below outcomes are some of the ways MuleSoft is being leveraged by forces, from continuing to enhance the victim journey to crime prevention and realizing data as an asset.
Conclusion
Technological integration plays a pivotal role in enhancing police-citizen engagement, which is increasingly crucial for maintaining public trust and confidence in law enforcement agencies. While the connection between integration and citizen engagement may not be immediately apparent, the foundation of effective engagement lies in timely, relevant, and personalized interactions, all of which rely heavily on data accessibility and management.
