West Midlands Police adopts cloud and machine learning as part of 'data-driven policing' ambitions

West Midlands Police (WMP) is the second-largest Police Force in the UK, covering the cities of Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, equivalent to 348 square miles (900 square kilometres). It sees its mission as working to create a safer community for the 2.8 million citizens it serves, preventing crime and helping those in need. As with any major Police Force, WMP deals with a lot of data, which increases through every interaction it has with the public, from the 2000 emergency calls it receives daily to the work cases officers handle on the streets. This is all now being handled a lot better after work from enterprise data cloud specialists Cloudera working with Accenture, who have created one new core data hub, the Data Driven Insights Project. Being creative and thinking of new approaches to achieve this is one of its key internal values, its Director of IT and Digital, Helen Davis, believes-and its new'Data Driven Insights Project' is a perfect example of just such thinking.