Bringing the power of AI to policing
A platform for the future built with Appian
After 12 years on the frontline with the Met and City of London Police, Andy Willmer brought his experience to Deloitte, helping law enforcement to tackle its biggest challenges through organisational change and technology.
Now, in a further boost for innovation, Deloitte and Appian have launched a suite of AI-powered solutions and capabilities to help policing modernise core operations and transition to AI-enabled, data-driven systems. The aim is so that forces can harness their data and officers can spend more time doing what they do best – serving the public.
Modern tech for modern forces
“When I was an officer, we went out on patrol because crime was most likely to happen on the streets in front of you,” says Andy. “Now, it’s more likely to occur online or in private spaces, which demands different capabilities.”
The complexity caused by digital and cross-border crime, alongside rising demand and constrained budgets, is at the root of the government’s police reform agenda. The recent announcement of PoliceAI, a new national centre dedicated to developing, piloting and scaling solutions across the sector, clearly shows the size of the UK’s ambition.
As part of this modernisation, we’ve expanded our global alliance with Appian, a leading AI automation platform. Together, we’ve developed a suite of tools that bring a data-driven, uniform approach to critical areas of policing, from managing records to custody processing. Unveiled in June, the new AI-powered tools have the potential to inform decisions, drastically cut time spent on admin and enable officers and forces to share intelligence more easily.
Andy continues: “Policing needs new solutions; it’s not just a question of resource. Together with Appian, our solutions provide a unified approach to case and process management across critical policing functions.
Our focus is deriving insight from their data by safely using AI. Even if it fixes a small part of an everyday process, it can transform productivity.”
“I say to clients that my experience as an officer doesn't mean I can tell them how to do policing. But it does mean I know how to do what Deloitte does in their environment.”
Andy Willmer, Partner and UK and EMEA Policing Lead, Deloitte
AI insights in minutes
As police forces across the UK undergo a major transformation, moving away from fragmented legacy systems and working in silos, this unified approach enables forces to adopt a flexible, future-proof platform-based model that connects workflows, data, and AI in one environment. This approach also allows policing to replace manual, fragmented processes with intelligent automation and case management, reducing administrative burden, improving data quality, and accelerating investigations.
For example, whenever someone is taken into custody, their possessions are checked and logged. Our tools can photograph items and automatically generate a list. Instead of taking an hour, it happens almost instantly with officers performing the final check.
Records analysis is another area where automation can make a real difference. When an individual is brought into custody regularly, the officer on shift will only know their history if they’ve searched multiple records. AI can surface critical details quickly, informing how police handle the situation.
Additionally, the policing team at Deloitte is helping forces to better understand and manage demand for their services. For one client, AI is transcribing, summarising and analysing 101 calls.
“We’ve developed a tool that can show, for example, if a call about a theft is connected to an ongoing domestic issue, as the tool can highlight if there’s a vulnerable person involved,” explains Andy.
“AI can also identify which call handlers have been dealing with particularly distressing caller content and therefore might need a welfare intervention, or if a client needs to build more capability in domestic abuse care to manage demand.
“We’re tapping into data that police forces have always had, but now we can analyse it in minutes. That’s a powerful use case.”
Forensic meets digital
Advancing our services in relation to digital evidence is another way in which we’re responding to the growing role of tech in law enforcement.
Deloitte's UK Digital Forensic Laboratory has secured a UKAS accreditation, predominantly held by UK law enforcement agencies, to undertake forensic science activities, an accreditation predominantly held by UK law enforcement agencies.
This means we can strengthen our consultancy offering for police forces, offering dependable and accredited digital forensic support to address growing investigative demands. In practical terms, this means helping those on the frontline access trusted forensic capability when capacity is stretched.
It’s another example of how policing, and our policing business, has changed dramatically in the 16 years since Andy joined the firm.
And while the importance of using technology to transform how crime is detected and prevented continues to grow, for Andy, AI in policing is not about reinventing the wheel; it’s about unlocking the valuable information that forces already have, and the potential that lies within that.
“We can identify use cases where AI technology can genuinely transform existing work for the better,” he says. “It’s where Deloitte can provide a lot of test and challenge. We’re helping police forces to understand the capability and the opportunity, and I really enjoy seeing the impact of that."
“In policing, AI provides decision support. It isn’t the technology that’s intelligent – it’s the experienced officers who, in high-risk situations, use the relevant, up-to-date insights that AI generates to make decisions that benefit everyone.”
