Police Service of Northern Ireland pursues speedy justice

Making policing less bureaucratic and more effective

Crime is down in Northern Ireland, but for the regional police service, that doesn’t mean it’s time to relax. Instead, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is on a mission to streamline critical processes like evidence-gathering and collaboration with the court system. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the administrative burden on police officers so PSNI can deliver better services to citizens. 

“Speedy justice is a term we use a lot these days,” says Jeff McNamara,  Head of Information & Communications Services at PSNI. “All of our technology projects in the criminal space have the aim of speeding up the criminal justice process for the well-being of the public as well as efficiency and cost savings within the public sector.” 

This was the impetus behind an end-to-end review of all the organization’s processes, and what led them to adopt Intelligent Content Management as a solution to several legacy challenges. But adopting Intelligent Content Management was not technology for technology’s sake. “In policing,” McNamara elaborates, “we don’t take technology forward simply for the sake of it. We always have a business problem we’re trying to solve.” 

The “problem,” in this case, was how to speed up cumbersome workflows with secure content sharing and collaboration. The solution turned out to be Box.  Chief Superintendent Gary McDonald agrees: “Technology is key to reducing demand on our frontline and delivering a much better service to victims.”

Tightening up the flow of information 

PSNI is a large regional police service covering the entire province of Northern Ireland, with a number of different departments, from frontline policing to crime investigation. Teams do everything from responding to emergency calls to ensuring offenders are brought to justice via the court system. It takes a whole spectrum of policing to keep Northern Ireland safe — specifically, around 6,300 officers and 2,500 police staff. 

“Being a police service, our primary concern is always information security,” says McNamara. “It’s about adding efficiency and sometimes cost savings — and making the police officer’s job easier — but with security in mind.” 

The PSNI procurement process for any new technology platform includes evaluating for risk, and Box was at a distinct advantage here because it already had national-level classifications in place. McNamara says, “This made it an easy exercise in some aspects of accreditation, because we didn’t need to go through and assess an entire policy. We knew that Box had already done that work and put a lot of effort into this space.” 

Now, if a file is inadvertently shared with the wrong person, IT can immediately revoke access — unlike with a thumb drive handed over to the wrong person, or a file copied and shared without their knowledge. In addition, they use Box Shield to meet data protection goals in terms of compliance, for instance lowering risks for certain folders by limiting recipients allowed to access those folders.

Streamlining witness statements for 100K+ crimes a year 

PSNI handles over a hundred thousand crimes per year, and collecting witness statements has traditionally been a very labor-intensive role, requiring two officers to travel to the witness — sometimes across the country. Collecting statements often involves other parties like the ambulance service, and coordinating all of these statements in person was very time consuming. 

Working with Box and other partners, PSNI was able to create a bespoke solution — a digital evidence submission portal — for collecting witness statements and evidence from members of the public remotely. Victims and witnesses of crimes, along with other involved services, can now upload their testimonies and supporting documentation privately and quickly.  This type of highly sensitive unstructured data is handled securely, made available immediately, and shared easily with investigating officers. 

Box Sign has been a big component of this shift because PSNI can now validate statements remotely with e-signature. There’s also been a financial savings to this change, because instead of paying two officers and the cost of a vehicle (or a plane ticket) to travel to witnesses, everything happens online.

Ensuring offenders are brought to justice quickly 

Collecting witness statements and evidence is only the first step to crimefighting, of course. When criminal cases go to court, PSNI has to get all of the statements, evidence, and other correlating content over to the prosecution. 

Traditionally, PSNI  used DVDs, USB drives, and optical media to physically move files and evidence from one stage of the investigation to the next. This sometimes meant traveling to bring evidence to another part of the country — or even internationally, in the case of cybercrime investigation. This was always a cumbersome process, but the volume of evidence has increased as digital evidence has taken off: CCTV, doorbell videos, witness videos taken on a smartphone. 

Using Box to share this critical content has been a massive paradigm shift driven by a specific mission. “In simple terms,” says McNamara, “The project was about removing DVDs and physical media from the criminal justice process. Using Box, we’re able to collect evidence remotely and digitally from members of the public, plus store it and handle it securely.” 

Chief Superintendent McDonald agrees: “When the time comes to share that investigation outward through the greater criminal justice system — for example with the prosecution — it’s a much more effective way.”

How Intelligent Content Management has changed policing 

Intelligent Content Management has transformed some of PSNI’s key workflows, and it’s also made everyday work more efficient for employees. Chief Superintendent McDonald confirms, “Where we’ve used Box, we've seen some real tangible outputs and benefits in terms of time savings that can be reinvested back into the frontline, putting police officers where they need to be.” 

Part of the reason for PSNI’s success in instituting Box is that change management was very smooth. They didn’t want to bring in a new technology platform that would have a steep learning curve. Many of the software systems entrenched in the PSNI workplace were already complex and difficult to learn, and “we wanted to make things faster for our force, not more complex,” says McNamara. “The intuitive interface of Box has really surprised me. Very minimal training was required. Users are able to just pick it up and go.”

How policing in Northern Ireland will evolve 

“Box came on a journey with us and has been willing to understand policing to help solve our business problems,” says McNamara. “It’s been hugely successful, creating efficiencies in the criminal justice system and speeding up the victim journey.” 

While Box came along to help fix a content sharing problem, Intelligent Content Management has opened up a whole new world of technology possibility for PSNI. AI can help surface important information within large files — whether they be textual witness statements, lengthy video, or recorded conversations — and further streamline critical processes like evidence-gathering. 

McNamara says, “We’re at the foothills of understanding AI for use in policing. We’re hopeful that we can look to AI making the police officer’s day more efficient by surfacing the right information. We’re at the start of that compliance and governance journey, and we look to have Box help us with it over the next few years."

 

The major benefit of Box is making a police officer’s job less bureaucratic — keeping them doing what they do best, which is investigating crimes in the field, not moving paperwork around in the office.

— Jeff McNamara, Head of Information & Communications Services, PSNI