Gloucestershire Constabulary calls in SAS to help support the Freedom of Information Act

SAS to help police data quality

13 April 2005 -  Gloucestershire Constabulary has selected SAS, the leader in business intelligence, to help it meet its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA), as well as to achieve the operational efficiency targets mandated in its five year strategic development plan, Vision 5. The Constabulary will be using SAS to identify data quality issues, which will help limit the embarrassment and litigation that poor data quality could expose the Constabulary to under the FoIA. In practical terms, having the correct data could ensure that a police officer arrives at the right place at the right time to apprehend a criminal.

Like every organisation, Gloucestershire Constabulary faces data quality issues caused by poor data collection and entry, as well as the further problem of information being spread across a number of incompatible computer systems. The police's problem is also aggravated by the fact that criminals regularly provide false information that cannot be verified, such as the wrong date of birth, an incorrectly spelt name, or forenames that are switched. In addition, Gloucestershire Constabulary's user community has grown over the past ten years from around 50 IT users to nearly 1,500 increasing the opportunities for inaccuracies and inconsistencies to enter the system.

To address these issues, Gloucestershire Constabulary is using SAS' integration and data quality software, SAS® Enterprise ETL Server, to pull together information from a number of incompatible databases into a central repository, which is available on the Intranet. Clusters of similar data are identified and, where necessary, corrected thereby ensuring that the Constabulary has a single view of all the information it holds in various databases. This will ensure that, for example, under the FoIA, the Constabulary cannot be accused of withholding important information – and possibly sued – because bad data prevented the retrieval of the relevant records.

"We did not make things easy for SAS," said Reg Barnard, IS Development Manager at Gloucestershire Constabulary. "Our legacy systems have incompatible software. However, SAS easily overcame this problem, and once the information is extracted from the source systems, it is subjected to SAS data quality procedures to profile, cleanse and standardise the data, using match coding. SAS is very powerful when it comes to clustering the near-matches to help us correct data and bring it up to date, so it saves a huge amount of time and resources."

"What's more, SAS is really easy to use, considering how powerful it is. The drag-and-drop technology means you don't need any specialist programming knowledge, just some basic knowledge of the data you are interrogating. In no time you are producing reports that will amaze the most senior management."

"The police typically work in difficult circumstances where mistakes happen, mistakes that ordinary database software will not identify, even when it is working properly," said John Dalton, SAS UK's Chief Operating Officer. "SAS offers the additional layer of intelligence that enables Gloucestershire Constabulary not only to spot individual mistakes but also to help it correct procedures and identify training needs." He added, "We are absolutely delighted that Gloucestershire Constabulary is pioneering this application in order for the police to meet their obligations under the FoIA."

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