TOEX Needed a way to conflate both regional and national datasets into one data solution

Overview

The Tackling Organised Exploitation programme, or TOEX, has been developed to create a more holistic and ‘whole systems’ approach to tackling organised exploitation.

“The opportunity to bring together information and data onto a single data platform is revolutionary. This is the first time in UK policing that this has been delivered.”

Kate Thacker
Detective Chief Superintendent, TOEX

Problem

Previously, tackling organised crime has been a huge challenge – officers had to manually search various datasets to find information to inform their decision-making, which not only was a time-consuming process, but could be inconsistent and had a higher chance of human error.

Solution

TOEX recognised this challenge, and together with Simpson Associates developed a single data solution for Policing. This is the first solution to bring together regional delivery teams and national coordinated teams to create an enhanced intelligence picture of organised exploitation.

The single data solution enables data to be shared across forces, agencies, and third parties, enhancing collaboration and evidence-based decision making. Ultimately, this will contribute to the safeguarding of vulnerable people and disarming those causing harm.

Key Benefits

A data platform like this supports the concept of using explainable machine learning tools as a method of identifying hidden harm. Not only would this improve the efficiency of hidden harm identification, but it would build up a wealth of evidence which can be used to inform decision making.

The data solution for TOEX comprises of two key parts:

• A data platform hosted in Microsoft Azure
• A data analytics portal featuring Microsoft Power BI

TOEX’s data platform is hosted in Microsoft Azure, which allows the infrastructure to be written as a code, and therefore has enabled Simpsons to deploy to different environments quickly and efficiently, and keep the infrastructure consistent across environments.

Azure was chosen due to the ambition to go national, particularly using components such as Delta Lake within Azure and Synapse Analytics. This will allow the solution to meet the necessary requirements should the data platform go national.