A duty to all Londoners

The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial Police service responsible for law enforcement across Greater London. The service covers an area of 620 square miles and a population of over 7 million residents.

The Met Police wanted to transition its existing engagement platform from a simple publishing site into an operational police station, providing localised and specific content to the public. The new site was to become an interactive engagement tool to capture, process and complete crime reporting and engagement services. A game-changer for a UK police force.

Direct engagement with the masses

The Met Police partnered with Optimizely partner CDS to create the new website. CMS functionality was utilised, whilst developing additional components through the open API. The core transactional aspect of the solution was a bespoke forms engine, which was the backbone of the public engagement function. The solution enables the public to interact with the MPS on various aspects such as crime reporting and licence applications. There are many different types of crime and each question directs people, through logical branching, down a specific route, whether to act or await a response from the appropriate person in the MPS who is alerted by the system. Along with the public engagement features the solution delivers localised content related to Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT) areas. This provides a community level service whereby the public are informed about the most prevalent crime trends and offered information about how to prevent and avoid being a victim of those crime types, specific to each SNT area.

The Metropolitan Police Service website delivers a fundamental transition from a publishing website to an operational police station.  Website visitors are guided from the homepage toward logical, easy to use routes for specific tasks to enable them to:  Report crime, view local statistics and crime prevention advice, complete transactions (such as license applications, apply for National Safety Awareness courses, feedback to the MPS) all end-to-end online and deliver a fully accessible service that is: mobile and desktop compatible, is truly usable from a web standards and disability/accessibility perspective, that is presented and authored in the language of a member of the public rather than as a member of the law enforcement community.

Given more choices and a newly developed leading-edge website the public is moving from front desk and call centre to interacting with the Met online. The Met Police has seen a growth of 25% more people using online instead of the Met’s call centre. Each contact via the website, instead of call centre, achieved for the Metropolitan police is equivalent, according to industry figures, to an approximate cashable saving of £9 for every transaction.