West Midlands Regional Innovation and Research Group Update
The West Midlands regional forces – Staffordshire Police, Warwickshire Police, West Mercia Police and West Midlands Police (WMP) collectively serve over 6 million people. Each area is different and each force unique – but they all share the ambition to harness science and technology to tackle common challenges and drive improvements in service delivery, efficiency and productivity. Each force within the region, and colleagues from the Regional Organised Crime Units and Counter Terrorism Policing, form the Regional Innovation and Research Group (RIRG). The group helps to identify priority areas of focus, share good practice, inter-force collaboration and updates on projects.
• Warwickshire may be the second smallest territorial police force in England and Wales but has a bold vision to maximise value from technological innovation. Through an in-house developed Nexus platform and supported by scalable data infrastructure and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), they are delivering key applications for officers to record and interact with data in the field using iPhones. Applications include: briefing and tasking; problem solving; investigations; stop & search and use of force recording; and a digital pocket notebook.
• Through Police STAR funding, West Mercia Police, in partnership with Swansea University, are delivering DRAGON - Spotter, Developing Resistance Against Grooming Online. This project aims to improve digital forensics for investigating child sexual exploitation by developing an AI linguistics search function to speed up the identification of grooming behaviour and streamline workload in processing cases. This will target the increasing complexity and volume of child sexual exploitation cases.
• West Midlands Police (WMP) is the first UK force to answer non-emergency calls with AI. A flagship innovation for policing, Andi-Esra is an in-house AI voice assistant tool answering all force 101 calls. Built by WMP in partnership with TTEC Digital and AWS, Andi-Esra understands why people are calling 101 and fast-tracks calls from vulnerable members of the public to a human operator. Launched in December 2024, its first 24 hours of service answered 2,530 calls. This innovation contributes to the dramatic improvement seen in national data for WMP, whose human operators are answering 96 per cent of 999 calls within 10 seconds and Andi-Esra answering 99 per cent of 101 calls in just eight seconds.
These are just some examples of cutting-edge activity across the West Midlands. The Regional Innovation CoOrdinator ACC Matt Welsted steers the collective ambition to continuously improve and innovate, and this has been strengthened by the appointment of the Regional Science and Innovation Manager (RSIM), Jane Sanderson.
