Future-ready law enforcement: Bedfordshire Police embraces digital agility to deliver modern policing services

This is a guest post from Bedfordshire Police, an AWS customer.

A collaboration between the UK’s Bedfordshire Police and HAQM Web Services (AWS) resulted in rapid deployment of high-impact, cloud-based solutions that free up officer and staff time and resources. This has helped officers to better serve communities and victims. Based on cloud technology, the model is easily replicable by other law-enforcement organizations.

Like most law-enforcement organizations, Bedfordshire Police, in the UK, faces multiplying crime threats and limited resources to fight them. We need to be effective and efficient in protecting citizens. This means we need to make best use of the public money that funds us, and improve the experiences of the people we serve.

Modern policing needs a modern approach. Today, we’re dealing with more weapons-based violence, gangs, drugs, and cybercrime, and this calls for new ways to protect the public and fight crime. Digital technology has enormous potential to help, as long as we can deploy it swiftly and efficiently.

To modernize Bedfordshire’s approach to policing, we had to change how we approached technology.

Heavy administrative tasks hampered officers’ work, so we needed a way to efficiently return their focus to fighting crime and delivering justice. Everyday frustrations included hours spent redacting personally identifiable information from evidence submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) as well as collating and analyzing data to build a case. Then there’s the manpower tied up with guarding crime scenes. All of this is a drain on resources and staff morale.

While we recognized technology’s potential to enhance our work practices, our existing systems needed updating and our internal IT capacity faced some constraints. The traditional process of implementing new solutions—from defining requirements through to deployment and training—often meant that by the time a system was fully operational, business needs had evolved.

We needed a new approach to how technology was delivered.

A digital innovation partnership

We met with AWS to discuss how we could approach things differently. We knew we wanted to host any future solutions in a secure, scalable cloud. This is the accepted model in the public sector now—not just to add more servers, but to deploy innovative new capabilities at speed. Visits to other Forces confirmed this as the way forward.

We chose to work with AWS, because it has infrastructure that’s fully compliant with public-sector specifications (such as local data hosting) and is well-proven in a government and judicial context. It also offered access to an extensive pool of solution partners that would help us address modern policing challenges.

We realized we could learn a lot from a company built on agile and innovative solutions. AWS has a culture of innovation. Its processes aligned with our desire to be more responsive—to take a more “programmatic” or solution-oriented approach to policing, supported by the latest digital capabilities. Tools that are instinctively easy to use would also limit the time needed to train officers.

AWS quickly helped us to identify and deliver high-impact digital transformation solutions securely and at speed.

Working backwards and officer input

To address the need for fast access to new automation tools, AWS proposed an approach it uses internally—which is to look to the future and think big, but to start small. Its “working backwards” workshops helped cement the idea that if an issue isn’t fully understood, even the best solution will fail. We learned to drill down to identify specific pain points and find practical solutions, rather than devise a pilot and expect it to solve everything.

For example, we needed to rethink demand management in our control room, which faced unsustainable levels of demand—much of which didn’t need a human response. Although we’d introduced a webchat option, this actually created more work. By working with AWS, we devised an AI-based chatbot to help to manage non-emergency public contact, by filtering incoming traffic and signpost users to the best source.

Another approach we adopted was inspired by an apprenticeship program run at AWS. We now hold an annual Dragons’ Den/Shark Tank-style event. It encourages staff at all levels to propose ideas for solutions to transform our work and operational efficiency. The best ideas are shortlisted and the winners put into development. It has really captured people’s imagination. They’ve become part of the solution. Our culture has changed and officers now regularly approach us with new ideas.

Far-reaching impact

Working alongside AWS has changed the way Bedfordshire Police approaches innovation and process reinvention. For a long time, policing was about buying. Now, we think in terms of developing solutions. We also ensure all new solutions are intuitive, with no special training needed. That ensures high engagement and adoption, and the result is a much faster impact.

The control room’s AI-based chatbot saves more than 1,500 staff hours per year. Routine queries—concerning animals, fly-tipping, custody, property, civil disputes, to name a few—are automatically routed to the most appropriate source. As 39 percent of chatbot enquiry demand doesn’t need agent input, we can prioritize calls that do require immediate police attention.

The AI-powered digital document-redaction solution is so fast and accurate in redacting personally identifiable information from documents submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service—it takes minutes to complete a job that previously took hours. The AI tool has a human-in-the-loop. Humans set the parameters for the redaction tool, specifying what information it is to detect and redact. Once the redaction is done, humans review the document to ensure compliance. This solution has saved more than 9,000 hours a year, equivalent to almost seven full-time officers. In September 2024, this innovation won the National Police Chiefs’ Council Commissioner’s award at the National AI Awards.

The change of pace in Bedfordshire’s innovation delivery has been huge. The redaction solution was developed in just three months, with enhancements actioned in hours. Seeing that rapid delivery is great for morale. Redaction used to be the biggest source of complaint, but now it is rarely mentioned.

Best of all, officers can do the policing they’re trained for. All this has transformed our ability to protect and serve the public, and supported the delivery of better justice.

Keeping citizens safe

Everything we do is geared to better outcomes for citizens. Another way we use AI tools is to collate intelligence faster, and protect vulnerable people more effectively.

In the UK, provisions under the new Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme give citizens the right to know if their partner has an abusive past. The ability to gather relevant data from different sources means we can now identify potential victims faster and more proactively, and warn them sooner. A multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) built on AWS’s cloud infrastructure supports this. We’re working with local authorities to automate and digitalize information, with the aim to integrate up to 65 data sources.

Sharing what we’ve learned

Something else we’re proud of is that our innovative new solutions are replicable globally. So another mindset we’ve adopted from AWS is to share what we’ve done.

After all, Bedfordshire Police’s challenges are not unique to our county, or to the UK. All police forces face challenges with demand management, document redaction, scene-guarding, and more. Up to now, our redaction solution has been rolled out across 18 other police forces in the UK. The College of Policing estimates it would save around 7.5 million policing hours a year if adopted nationwide—equivalent to more than 4,000 full-time officers.

Our takeaways are that this isn’t just about harnessing the cloud; it’s about cultural change. That means leaders changing how they think and work.

The significant change Bedfordshire has made to the way it polices, and how we harness technology to support that, isn’t about innovation for its own sake. The real beneficiary is the public. We can now confidently keep pace with increasing crime threats, keeping citizens safe while delivering justice.

Our next goals include leveraging AI to perform tasks currently handled manually by officers and staff, particularly in the research and analysis of the ever-growing volumes of both digital and non-digital data. By utilizing AI for these functions, we believe that Bedfordshire Police will become more productive and strengthen decision-making processes. Currently, research and analytical tasks consume 80 percent of an individual’s time, leaving only 20 percent for decision making. We aim to reverse this ratio, allowing 80 percent of the time to be dedicated to making informed decisions.

Visit AWS in the UK Public Sector to learn more about the possibilities of digital transformation for public sector organizations using the AWS Cloud.