In a recent article for Policing Insight, NTT DATA’s public safety and justice experts addressed the obstacles that hamper the movement of information and intelligence between police forces – leaving criminals, who can travel much more freely, at an advantage.
Police IT infrastructures and capabilities are, they argued, largely built around the 43 regional forces; in an era of increasingly borderless crime, the fragmentation of law enforcement’s own systems is a major barrier to improving both the detection and prosecution of crime, and the productivity of our criminal justice system.
You can read the full article in Policing Insight here.
Below, we revisit some of the key themes, including the role of common data standards, interoperable systems and responsible AI in creating a more connected policing ecosystem.
Unifying policing data: from impossibility to necessity
In 2024, the UK’s Policing Productivity Review, an independent report commissioned by the Home Office, found that “diversity in IT systems, challenges in attracting and retaining skills, [and] the absence of clear legal frameworks” are among the most significant barriers to scaling innovation across UK policing. The UK's 43 forces operate on incompatible platforms, and share information slowly. Organised crime does not have this problem. If policing is to close that gap, it needs a shared digital language that allows information to move as quickly as crime itself.
The technology landscape across UK policing has evolved locally, shaped by individual force priorities and legacy procurement decisions made over decades. The result is a patchwork of systems that differ widely between forces. Even small inconsistencies in how data is recorded reduce its value the moment it is shared. Officers end up reconciling conflicting records rather than acting on intelligence, which costs time, erodes trust in systems, and creates space for criminal activity to go undetected across force boundaries.
Data from the National Police Chiefs' Council puts a number on this problem: the Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser to Policing has estimated that smarter use of data and technology could release up to 15 million hours of police time per year, time that could be spent on frontline policing.
The 2025 to 2030 National Policing Digital Strategy sets out the direction of travel. It calls for clear standards, “accessible platforms”, and “fully interoperable digital solutions”, meaning systems that are built from the outset to connect with others rather than retrofitted to do so. This aligns directly with the Productivity Review's findings and represents the most significant policy commitment to joined-up policing technology in a generation.
The challenge extends beyond policing. Courts, prisons, and local authorities each operate within separate digital environments, with limited integration between them. A crime that starts with an arrest and ends with rehabilitation passes through multiple institutions, each of which may hold relevant information the others cannot access. Without stronger connections across the full justice system, a genuinely joined-up approach to public safety will remain out of reach.
How to build a shared digital foundation
Large-scale structural reform, such as merging forces, has been proposed as a solution to the fragmentation problem. There is a more practical path available now, and it does not require waiting for structural change to happen.
First, forces need to adopt common data standards. This does not mean every force running the same software. It means agreeing on how information is structured, labelled, and exchanged, so that a record created in one force can be read and acted on by another without manual translation.
The second step is building regional collaboration on infrastructure. Forces are already beginning to pool IT services, procurement, and data platforms at a regional level. This is a pragmatic approach that delivers interoperability without requiring wholesale system replacement.
Step three is using artificial intelligence to bridge the gaps that remain. Many forces will not replace legacy systems in the near term. AI tools can be deployed to connect those systems, interpret unstructured data such as free-text records and case notes, and identify links across incompatible platforms that would otherwise take officers hours to find manually. The key condition is that these tools are designed with oversight and accountability built in, not added later. AI used in policing carries real consequences for real people and must be explainable, auditable, and subject to human review.
Finally, forces can concentrate expertise regionally, and share it nationally. Not every force needs to build digital capability from scratch. Forces or regional groupings that lead in specific areas, whether that is AI-assisted intelligence analysis, digital evidence management, or predictive resource allocation, can develop tools and approaches for broader adoption through centres of excellence: dedicated teams that build once and deploy widely. This model already operates in areas such as forensics and serious organised crime. It can and should be extended to digital transformation.
Building for the long term
A fully unified policing structure is a long-term ambition. That ambition should not be used as a reason to delay progress on the things that are achievable now. Common standards, regional platforms, targeted AI deployment, and shared centres of excellence are all within reach for forces that are willing to prioritise them.
Forces will continue to operate locally. Crime will continue to operate without boundaries. The longer the gap between those two realities persists, the more opportunities organised crime has to exploit it. Closing that gap is not simply a matter of operational efficiency. It is a question of public safety, and the digital tools to address it already exist.