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techUK holds roundtable event with Paul Crowther, Chief Constable of the British Transport Police.

techUK members heard from the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police (BTP), Paul Crowther, on the integrated technologies that are supporting the BTP in achieving its strategic objectives, which are to:

• Keep transport systems running and reduce delays
• Reduce incidents of crime committed on public transport
• Promote confidence in the use of the railways and
• Deliver value for money

The BTP are the national police service for the railways in Britain and face a variety of different challenges compared to other police forces when it comes to using and procuring technology. The main challenge is geography as the BTP have to operate across Great Britain, dealing with two different legal and parliamentary systems in England and Scotland. This has major consequences for investigative issues and victim care and also creates challenges with internal communications as some crimes can span across regions and involve more than one regional division.

In order to address these challenges, the BTP has become an innovative, evidence based organisation that is willing to take risks in order to meet its objectives. Significant changes are therefore being made to ensure that the BTP rebalances its capability to become a force that focuses on prevention. A present, only one hour of training is currently spent working on prevention – something that the BTP is looking to rapidly change.
Along with changing the way that its own officers react to and prevent criminal acts from happening on the railways, the BTP is also looking to technological advancements to enable its officers to work more effectively and address key operational challenges.

An important element of this is the mobile working project and the desire to have a 'Police Station on a Tablet'; a move that saves an enormous amount of officer time. These will be off the shelf tablets with the decision on the choice of device being in the hands of the user.

Furthermore, a lot of work has already gone into an Integrated Systems Programme (ISP) which will provide an integrated solution bringing together data across crime, intelligence, case and custody and command and control. This will provide dramatic improvements in how BTP collects, manages and uses information and intelligence to support operational policing.

There are, however, a variety of challenges related to mobile working. Firstly, the unique nature of a BTP officer's working environment mean that connectivity is a problem in underground and some indoor locations. Furthermore, the proliferation of mobile devices and tablets create a number of questions for procurement leads on how to decide which device to use and how to ensure that they have interoperability with other criminal justice interfaces, particularly at a time when the digital agenda in the criminal justice system is moving at a faster pace than many forces are comfortable with.

Attendees at the briefing also heard about the importance of innovations in Body Worn Video (BWV) and CCTV technologies, creating a multitude of opportunities for those companies within the private sector which deal with video analytics. Training for BWV was launched in May 2015 and the BTP have been testing cloud based storage to capture, share and manage digital evidence. A key question for the BTP would be whether there was a way, with appropriate safeguards, for access to certain images being made available to a selection of companies who can then provide services such as behavioural analytics.

Another recent innovation is the use of other media platforms by the BTP for its control room operations.

For example, 18 months ago the force moved to allowing members of the public to text incident reports into its control centres and hold ongoing conversations with operators. This has revolutionised the way in which control rooms are operated and the BTP will soon move to new forms of communication with the public which will involve social media. The ability to monitor data from tools such as twitter and YouTube, for example, will provide officers with vast opportunities. This will, however, require an educational process for many officers who are not entirely comfortable using such tools.

Whilst the BTP is committed to utilising the vast opportunities made available by industry, difficulties remain when making investment decisions. How, for example, do you determine the future use of a particular technology or predict what the future holds for new devices and network requirements?

techUK is keen to continue its work with the BTP to help it navigate these questions and form a productive long-term dialogue with industry as a whole.