The ODI’s started working with the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) to develop an open data strategy, aimed at helping them understand the scale and type of data and information that people want to access more easily. The project will also work with the Met to help them understand and manage challenges around opening it up. Ultimately, it’s hoped that the Met will be able to publish more data openly, creating opportunities for it to be reused more effectively and, in turn, positively impacting on society.
Currently, the Met receives a large number of requests for data relating to policing in London. In 2021 alone, the Met received almost 5,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.
Whilst some data is openly available via online dashboards, the organisation wants to publish more data in an open, secure and transparent way.
The Met has also committed to making more relevant equalities information available to the public, such as crime and incident data, and data about how policing duties are conducted. This project is a part of that commitment.
The Met’s Director of Data, Aimee Reed, said:
'We are committed to ensuring the Met is transparent about what we do to keep people in London safe and how we do that. We believe being transparent is crucial to ensuring we have the trust of the people we serve, and there are already numerous ways the public can access information and data about the Met, including on its website and through Freedom of Information Act requests.
In the future, our aim is to enable the public, academics and our partners to access more of the data we collect – where it is ethical and lawful to do so – to better support us in understanding how we can improve the service we give to London.
In our ongoing commitment to be even more transparent, we have enlisted the help of the Open Data Institute to help us identify what additional information people would like to see and how they would like to access this information, with the ultimate aim of developing ways to make more information more readily available.'
The research for this project will be carried out in three phases including a public survey, and interviews with key people inside and outside the Met. This will involve talking to different Met departments, as well as public stakeholders such as members of marginalised communities, activists, charities and civil society organisations, alongside local authorities, academics and the mayor’s office.
The ODI will analyse the research findings, present recommendations for developing the Met’s open data strategy, and will co-create the strategy with the MPS Data Office.
The final strategy will be published later in 2022.
Any questions?
If you have any questions about this project, please email them to [email protected]