NDAS Modern Slavery Assessment

The National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) is a new, scalable and flexible analytics capability for UK law enforcement using advanced analytics to deliver insights to partners on agreed high priority operational and organisational issues. NDAS is sponsored and mandated by the Home Office and West Midlands Police (WMP) are operating on behalf of the Home Office as the Lead Force for its implementation. WMP are working through NDAS to develop a use case for modern slavery (MS). 

The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has flagged modern slavery as a type of crime that UK police need to better understand and combat more effectively. The often hidden nature of modern slavery, its connection to other serious crimes and human rights abuses and the enactment of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, formed a strong interest for NDAS to create a use case utilising advanced analytics to develop relevant insight and aid the investigation process into modern slavery.  

The AI dashboard, developed by Accenture, juxtaposes events already identified by police as modern slavery, with additional events that could potentially involve modern slavery. The objective of this endeavor is to inform strategic decision making via insights presented through modern slavery trends as well as to inform operational decision making. The ambition is to enhance the development and enactment of earlier, more precise and targeted proactive policing approaches and early interventions through the application of digital technology.  

– To support policy and intervention decision making
– Help form trend analysis of modern slavery
– Provide crimes, intelligence and associated person networks within the same tool and thus support the safeguarding of victims and vulnerable people
– Benefit the partnership response
– Improve the understanding of the relationships between victims and perpetrators 
– Combat modern slavery 

The project compliments Trilateral’s rich expertise in human trafficking and modern slavery (see e.g., project Honeycomb) as well as its leading role in understanding what is responsible AI and innovation.  

The development and use of any AI tool include both implicit and explicit value-choices. Consequently, the development and use of AI requires an ethics-by-design approach including an ethics assessment during and after development to ensure that the tool aligns with, protects and promotes fundamental rights and societal values. Using AI in the context of policing adds additional ethical significance as police activities have a critical impact on individuals’ wellbeing and civic and human rights.  

To ensure that the NDAS Modern Slavery Use Case promotes and protects rights and values, Trilateral Research has undertaken a comprehensive ethical and operational assessment of the AI dashboard. To achieve this objective, Trilateral has relied on its experts in the SocioTech for Good Insights Group (SIG) to employ a SocioTech approach which merges social science and humanities theories of ethics, digital ethics, policing ethics, bias and non-discrimination with modern slavery domain expertise and data science expertise.  

In addition to continuous feedback to the project’s stakeholders during the assessment, Trilateral Research will produce a final, comprehensive assessment report including insights into potential sources of bias and how to mitigate them, as well as future operational recommendations for policing with AI.