Connect-ing the Dots

How the Met Police spent £150 million to get a lot worse at solving crime

I found something interesting last week.

There a lot of police officers posting anonymously on Twitter¹, and a few followed me after threads I did about the criminal justice system. As a result, I came across something very odd in the Metropolitan Police’s arrest numbers.

In November 2022, the Met launched a new IT system named “Connect”, to replace several older programs. It cost them £150 million – and seems to be having some major problems. A quick browse of Reddit’s /r/PoliceUK subreddit shows a lot of unhappiness about the system:

• “Everytime I use Connect I want to cry”

• “I love the feature that if you click the tab of the card you're currently on it freezes you out and you lose everything. That's great.”

• “Worked on a case file for 3 hours, lost everything. But good thing is that the stress will kill me sooner so I don’t have to use connect as long.”

• “Here it's going great 8 hours of waiting time to book in custody, prisoners getting bailed instead of charged, Pc's having breakdowns/crying and quite a few resigning and applying for transfers because of it.…”

• “Heard someone said people are nicking less to avoid connect”

That last one is interesting. Connect is used to create custody records – ie, to “book-in” a prisoner. Are cops really avoiding arresting people because the IT system is too much hassle?

The Met publishes monthly statistics on arrest numbers, from January 2020 to July 2023, which you can see here. And what does it show?

In the entire period between January 2020 and October 2022, the monthly arrest numbers never dropped below 10,000 – the average was around 11,490. The month after Connect launched, arrests plummeted to 8,774². Since then, monthly arrests have stayed 10 to 15% lower than the pre-Connect average³

And this is only arrests – the first stage in a criminal investigation. What about charges and convictions? We know that case files are also prepared using Connect.

We don’t have as up-to-date data, and updates are only published quarterly. But we can get an indication on where things are going. Here are the percentage of reported crimes in London that had a suspect charged:

This is somehow worse than the arrest figures. In the quarter before Connect launched, 5% of crimes with a specific victim (such as robberies) were charged, and 21% of crimes with no specific victim (such as drug dealing) were charged. By the first quarter of the year, this had dropped to 2% and 10% respectively.

It is a masterpiece of public procurement: a tech upgrade that halves productivity.

We tend to think of the criminal justice system in terms of police officers, lawyers, courtrooms and prisons. Our framework for discussing crime and punishment revolves around people and legislation. But that misses something. Bad UX has cut arrests by 10% and charges by 50%. The police are no different to a widget manufacturer: their output is a factor of their tools and processes. Their output just happens to be “Justice”. Theories about the causes of crime and the purpose of the law are irrelevant compared with just giving PCs a functioning PC.

1. I won’t call it X. I am going to be like Peter Hitchens, calling Beijing “Peking” and Livorno “Leghorn”.

2. Important caveat. The spreadsheets published at london.gov.uk give entirely different figures for post-Connect arrests. Prior to that, both sets of figures line up. I have had to assume that there has been some kind of quality assurance (or a different data source) used in producing the graphics to eliminate a degree of double counting. Either way, the introduction of Connect has caused a significant change in police behaviour as well as issues with data quality. You will also note that officers have stopped bothering to record the suspect’s ethnicity in more cases - I have no idea why.

3. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no drop in recorded crime at this time (crime reporting doesn’t use Connect)