Community programme

2021 onwards

We're looking forward to building on our work over the past few years, to develop and support our most successful projects - and to realise a creative environment where volunteer professionals can improve the technology that underpins public safety.

Our plan includes the prototyping and development of several new projects, collaborations and partnerships that will help us to engage our community in activities that will benefit community safety and crime fighting.

We'll also be exploring new work to build consensus around open standards that can build a healthy ecosystem of interoperable policing applications, creating an ecosystem for wider and fairer competition in public safety technology.

Who supports Police Rewired?

Learn about our support from the worlds of policing, technology and innovation.

Contact us to participate in any of our initiatives: team@policerewired.org

Membership Programme

We're developing a membership programme for public safety organisations and police services.

Building on the success of our community development, it's an offering that includes:

  • Consultation time to explore, review and develop new problem-solving ideas.

  • Dedicated event planning and delivery to engage our community, and local tech communities with your problem statements.

  • Relationship building between your force, and institutions that can help to reduce technology costs or improve your outcomes with new, creative solutions.

Hack the Police 5

We've begun conversations to plan Hack the Police 5 - the next iteration of our annual hackathon, this time with a focus on future crime.

Previous events have steadily grown in size - and we're intending to grow again, across the UK and actively inviting international participation, too.

National Showcase

We're intending to hold a national showcase, for forces and public safety bodies to learn about the creative prowess of our volunteers, and the projects they have created.

The event will be online-first, and offer a physical aspect if coronavirus measures permit.

Active Citizens Toolkit

Initially scheduled for 2020, but reprioritised due to the pandemic, we'll be restarting our work on the Active Citizens Toolkit for 2021.

ACT is targeted at people who want to plan for emergencies, and actively take part in improving the lives of those around them.

It is an online publication, signposting opportunities to volunteer, and improve the public safety story for local communities. It features advice and articles from serving emergency service workers, alongside insights into joining emergency service reserves, such as the Special Constabulary.

Projects we've supported that could feature:

  • CRITr - a tool to help communities respond together to antisocial behaviour and public safety.

  • Emergency Recorder - a tool to automate the recording of vital information during emergencies.

Open standards roundtable

Open standards are the key to unlocking interoperability.

We'll be inviting representatives from leading police technology providers to join our roundtable, to discuss just how an open ecosystem of applications can work to tear down barriers between policing bodies, and to defeat incompatibilities between systems.

Open standards facilitate wider and fairer opportunities to provide and deliver policing technology.

We're seeking agreement to form a working group that can define open formats and APIs for:

  • Case file management

  • Crime reporting

Collaborations

We're actively seeking partners to collaborate on future projects, or to develop solutions and prototypes created by our volunteers.

This includes, but is not limited to, solutions that have demonstrated capabilities such as:

  • DNA forensics, and understanding new threat models to evidence. (See: DNA Impersonators)

  • Improving the search for missing people, through the application of machine learning, and through the engagement of active open source intelligence communities. (See: TraceLabs Search Party).

  • Develop new material for the Active Citizens Toolkit.

  • Partner-led events and projects, consultation, evaluations and feedback from our community.

Meaningful local interactions

We're looking for new solutions that can actively improve the relationship between local policing teams and the communities they serve.

Local meetings, often attended by a regular core of active citizens, risk providing limited or distorted insights into what is important when protecting a community.

We'll seek to develop tooling that can complement existing techniques, to understand local priorities in a meaningful way, and to help communicate what local teams are doing in response.

The policing experience

As 20,000 new officers join the ranks of policing, we'll be exploring ways that forces can continuously track their wellbeing and priorities. New officers will have plenty of feedback.

Technical solutions could provide up to the minute feedback, without the limitations of lengthy questionnaires or the drawbacks of partial uptake. For example, a tool on their mobile device could ask them a single question each day, or allow them to provide as much information as they want. Their inputs can be safely anonymised, but still retain key demographics to help protect identities and improve data quality.

We'll be exploring and prototyping these possibilities.

Micro-taskings

We'll continue to explore tooling and options that can build new ways to improve visibility and trust in policing, create efficiency, drive down fear of crime, and recognise and reward police officers who actively go above and beyond.

Show up and wait

In 2018 we began conversations to scope a micro-tasking solution that could find value in small jobs for officers between major taskings, and offer them recognition for completing them.

We'll resume work to prototype and prove this idea.

Prototyping new approaches

Referrals

Technology can make it quick and easy to refer people to local organisations and charities that can help them directly. Early work on a referrals tool that can make use of charitybase (a database of every UK charity) in previous years has shown that there's potential to speed up and improve the quality of referrals made through policing contact.

Further contact

Initiatives from policing have shown it is possible to identify people caught up in cycles of drug abuse - through connections made during investigation. Contacting these people with offers of support and referral could lower the barrier for them to seek help and make positive changes.

Are there other ways to reach people at risk from abuse, gangs, or addiction? Could a campaign of street signs, or pressure-washed 'pseudo-graffiti' raise their awareness of help at hand?

We propose to explore these use cases, conduct research, and prototype new tools that can help to reach people who would benefit the most from this contact.

Enquiries about any of our initiatives? team@policerewired.org

Credit for Hack the Police posters: HappyToastCredit for illustrations: Lukasz Adam; Scale by Flexiple