Informed Solutions has worked with the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) to enhance its national Mercury mutual aid platform: the data-led solution that enables the fast, coordinated deployment of officers and resources across the UK during planned and unplanned events and emergencies.

Through a series of exciting innovations in data analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management, NPoCC has enhanced its capability to enable it to better understand and respond to national capacity, capability, and wellbeing data in real time.

These innovations are helping NPoCC deliver its national resilience mission through enhanced insight, as well as improved speed and confidence in decision making.

Unlocking the Value of Policing Data for Resilience and Coordination

NPoCC plays a critical role in coordinating policing capability between police forces, ensuring the right resources, with the right skills, and specialised assets are deployed effectively when national-scale events or emergencies occur.

Mercury already held rich data about policing capacity, capability, and mutual aid. However, this information was stored in a variety of formats and systems, making it difficult to access analysis and insights quickly.

Planners and decision-makers needed:

A reliable national picture of available resources and skills
Faster, evidence-led decision-making for mutual aid
A better way to capture and learn from officer feedback after deployments

The goal was explore how Mercury could be enhanced by embedding intelligent machine-learning and data-driven capabilities that could be used daily, not just for reporting, but to actively support operational decisions.

Developing Capability for National Police Coordination and Resilience

Working closely with NPoCC, Informed Solutions brought ISO-42001 certified AI Management System expertise, as well as its trusted AI Readiness and InformedTRANSFORM™ methodologies to deliver three innovative, high-impact capabilities that met these challenges head-on.

A Modern Data and Reporting Platform

Working closely with operational users, Informed Solutions has integrated a new real-time Reporting and Data Analytics capability built on open-source technology.

Three initial high-priority interactive visual dashboards have been developed, focusing on:

Capacity and capability – showing national and regional strength across specialist roles, mapped to the Strategic Policing Requirement (SPR).
Mutual aid activity – visualising deployments, demand patterns, and historic trends to improve the speed and efficiency of coordination.
Data accuracy – building a national picture of data quality so issues and opportunities for improvement can be identified and addressed proactively.

These dashboards deliver live analysis, providing a trusted, single view of national policing capacity and capability, enabling teams to effectively coordinate and forward-plan for events using accurate, current data.

The work is enabling a move from retrospective reporting to an approach where data is captured, understood, and acted on in real time and in one place.

Evidence-Led Mutual Aid Planning Recommendations

Informed developed a planning recommendation capability, using intelligent models to help police identify which police regions to approach first for mutual aid when planning events or emergency responses.

Using machine learning and statistical modelling, the tool considers:

Current available capacity across forces
Geographical proximity to the event location
Historical data on similar events and roles

These factors are weighted to generate a ranked list of suggested regions, along with a confidence score to support human-in-the-loop decision making. The model is transparent and adjustable, enabling expert decision-makers to see why certain recommendations are made and adapt the criteria as needed.

This means mutual aid requests and coordination can be executed faster, based on consistent evidence rather than time-consuming, manual, ad-hoc analysis and estimation. Over time, data on how recommendations are used and fulfilled helps the system learn and improve, further improving planning capability.

Unlocked, Actionable Insight From Officer Feedback Using AI

NPoCC collects written feedback from officers after deployments. These reports capture invaluable information about welfare, organisation, and operational challenges. Until now, this data was difficult to explore and analyse at scale, and difficult to learn from.

Using its AI Readiness Assessment method, Informed Solutions undertook a Knowledge Management proof-of-value that applies natural language processing (NLP) to extract meaning and trends from thousands of survey responses.

The system performs:

Cleansing and redaction of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to remove personal identifiers and ensure privacy
Topic modelling to identify key themes such as logistics, accommodation, and communications
Sentiment analysis to understand the tone and mood across responses
Semantic search so planners can instantly query vast amounts of historical information and feedback
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to summarise insights into short, evidence-based briefings for future deployments, underpinned with references and citations to specific reports and examples.

This capability enables NPoCC to identify emerging issues and share lessons learned across policing, ensuring officer experience informs future planning, policy, and welfare decisions.

Connected Capabilities for Smarter Policing

Delivered as an integrated suite of user-centric capabilities, these innovations in advanced reporting, recommendations, and knowledge management reinforce one another:

Dashboards provide trusted, up-to-date data for operational visibility.
Recommendations use that data to speed up and strengthen decision-making.
Knowledge management feeds back officer insight to improve future deployments and resilience.

Together they create a data-driven national coordination ecosystem, positioning Mercury as a first-of-its-kind advanced operational coordination, decision and analysis platform.

High-Impact, High-Trust Innovation

The new capabilities mean NPoCC can now:

Identify national capability gaps earlier and take proactive action.
Mobilise faster with evidence-led recommendations.
Make data quality visible across forces, tackling improvements together.
Learn directly from officer experience at scale.

Planners, analysts, and leadership teams can access the same live view, ensuring consistent understanding of national capacity and demand.

The ML-powered feedback analysis also means wellbeing and logistics issues can be detected and acted upon sooner, improving officer experience and, sustainability and resilience of mutual aid operations.

Operationalisation and Adoption

The next phase of work will focus on further adoption and scaling:

Embedding dashboards and recommendations into daily planning workflows.
Expanding data sources and refining model weightings with live feedback.
Scaling the knowledge management capability across more survey datasets.
Linking officer feedback insights into actionable insights for improvement.

Why This Matters for UK Policing and Public Safety

National resilience relies on the ability to understand, decide, and act quickly at scale. By combining modern analytics, responsible machine learning, and explainable AI, Informed Solutions and NPoCC have built capabilities that enhance trust, speed, and operational readiness.

The innovations are already changing how national coordination is done, helping police plan smarter, mobilise faster, and ensure resilience across public safety.

Mark Williams, Assistant Chief Constable for the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) said: “This work represents a significant step forward in how we coordinate policing capability at a national level. Through close partnership with Informed Solutions, we are unlocking the value of our data and gaining clearer insights into where machine learning can deliver practical operational benefits for policing.

“The work with Informed Solutions has enabled us to go beyond exploring technical feasibility, and has supported our data quality, governance, and our ability to roll out new features into live operations. This has given our teams greater confidence, speed and clarity when planning for and responding to national-scale events and emergencies.

“This is not machine learning for its own sake; it is judiciously and responsibly applied innovation to strengthen our service, helping UK policing respond more effectively when it matters most.”