Police Rewired
Volunteers, fighting crime, with code.
Who we are
Police Rewired is a community for volunteer professionals, students and academics.
We connect independent technologists with policing organisations, front-line policing staff, community groups, and partners to solve problems in policing and public safety.
We run hackathons like Hack the Police and Hack Hate to bring the civic tech community and policing practitioners together, and to prototype new tools to fight crime.
We support our volunteers to build projects and tools that improve public safety.
Our data community looks for insights into difficult questions in public safety through the lens of open data.
We advocate for modern standards, open data and open technologies that will increase public trust in policing.
All our projects are open source and community-led.
Join our community mailing list, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook to stay up to date with everything we're doing.
Meet-ups
2020 meet-ups:
Hack Hate 2020 presentations, 8th November, online.
Hack Hate 2020 opening, 11th October, online.
NSA Python Study Group, 28th March, online.
Projects mixer, 8th February, Discord.
2019 meet-ups:
Hack the Police 4 Showcase, 25th November, New Scotland Yard
Hack the Police 4, 14-15th September, London
Emergency Recorder planning, 16th May, Discord
Burglary Victims Bot Project Meet, 12th March, London
Read the latest!
Dec 2020
Hack Hate: Tech specialists, students, problems solvers and police join forces to fight hate crime, Policing Insight 🔒 (mirror)
Nov 2020
Hacking out hate crime, a BAE Systems blog from their team at Hack Hate
Apr 2020
Look for the helpers, the story of volunteerism during the corona-crisis, from open data
We're only human, how we cleaned up the data from thousands of volunteer groups across the UK
Mar 2020
Feb 2020
Police Rewired and Hack the Police, College of Policing WhatWorks
May 2019
Developing technology that can help us be better witnesses, Policing Insight 🔒
April 2019
Using data to fight crime, Policing Insight 🔒
March 2019
February 2019
🔒= paywalled
2020 in review
2020 threw a number of curveballs our way. We adapted our approach and priorities in the face of new health and safety considerations...
We held Hack Hate - a 3-week, online, data-driven hackathon against hate crime, featuring experts from the Metropolitan Police, Inclusion London, Stop Hate UK, GALOP, CST, the College of Policing, the Alan Turing Institute, Rutgers University, the Observatory on Social Media (Indiana University), the UK Data Service, and Tikkunology: hackhate.org
We placed our plans for the Active Citizens Toolkit on hold, and repurposed the domain to highlight and share COVID-19 support and volunteering opportunities: activecitizens.uk
We built an accompanying site for those seeking help during the first lockdown, when support networks and information availability was still in early stages: helpisavailable.org.uk
We developed and grew our civic-tech community.
We connected policing and public safety bodies with experts from our community, to help plan solutions and solve problems.
We stepped up our work to advocate for...
open, accessible, user-centric design and development for public safety.
common standards and open APIs to build tools that are truly interoperable.
open source code, and open data to help build trust between police and the communities they serve.
Previously...
Detect the Undetected!
50 developers, designers, students, academics, police officers and staff joined us in September 2019 for Hack the Police 4. Working with partners from the College of Policing and the MPS, we delivered investigation themed challenges and the teams at the hack produced a dozen innovative new solutions - from crime scene to case file...
Growing and developing investigative projects...
In November 2019, we were fortunate enough to be able to bring 6 of the projects from Hack the Police 4 to New Scotland Yard. Winning teams were able to present their projects to a room of investigators and experts in policing - who offered their support, advice and connections to help bring these projects to life.
For a flavour of our events from 2018, view our 2018 Q4 term card!
November 2018: Projects meet
On November 6th we held our first meet-up at Newspeak House to kick off some exciting new projects. We welcome software developers, designers, and creative problem-solvers.
If you're interested in joining a project, or if you'd like to pitch an idea to other developers, join our community.
December 2018: Hack the Police 3
Hack the Police 3, the original policing hackathon, took place in two locations during December 2018. Police Rewired worked in partnership with CSCV to deliver the Lincoln event, and led the London event. If you love hackathons and you want to do something exciting and worthwhile, keep an eye out for future events.
August 2013: Hack the Police
In 2013, Officers from the Commissioner's 100, a change group within the Metropolitan Police, held the first policing hackathon and named it Hack the Police.
December 2017: Hack the Police 2
Only 4 years later, Hack the Police returned, this time in collaboration with the Forensic Psychology Unit at Goldsmiths.
April 2018: Software self-defence 101
Police Rewired hosted a short talk from Glyn Wintle, cyber security professional and outspoken advocate of best practices. Glyn shared tools and tips for designing security into software; and told a few horror stories everybody should hear...