Thus, in the face of enormous challenges, Sims does not see peril but instead has recognized an opportunity to adapt to broader cultural and technological shifts. The key, he realized, was finding a way to “configure [the organization] to manage that challenge” and then communicating to the public that even though it might seem like they were getting poorer services, their communities were actually receiving better protection. “We have this potentially difficult dialogue with the public,” Sims said, “that says we are better at doing the policing, we’re better at protecting you, but the service we’re giving you isn’t as rose-tinted and nice as the service that you might want to see.”

A Private Sector Partner and the Power of Information

As he began to develop a reform strategy, Sims realized that typical responses to austerity—such as layoffs and other cost reductions—could only go so far; he realized that he needed the expertise of external partners to determine how to reshape his organization and make it run more effectively. “How do you introduce technology and in doing it, change the way the organization works and the people within operate?” Sims asked himself. “The answer to that is you have to have a really sophisticated, sequential delivery to make the thing fly in the way you expect.” Thus, he took the unusual step of seeking out private sector expertise and engaging the consulting firm, Accenture. Working together, the two organizations crafted WMP 2020, a blueprint released in summer 2015 outlining how the organization would reinvent itself over the next five years.

WMP 2020 has four key planks: listening to and reassuring key stakeholders, preventing harm, responding at pace, and being ready to learn and adapt. But underlying these goals is a commitment to using information more effectively and, more specifically, to obtaining valuable information from partners, harnessing the information it can obtain from crucial technologies, and disseminating information to citizens and other stakeholders about how WMP 2020 is making them safer. “Information and how information is used,” Sims explained, “is an absolute game changer in the way that [our] mission is going to be delivered.”

Partners, Technology, and the Public

In developing and beginning to implement WMP 2020, Sims and his colleagues have reached out not just to industry experts but also to academics—who have helped them to develop evidence-based policing strategies—as well as other government agencies. Among the most important of these are the county’s mental health professionals. WMP now operates triage cars staffed with police officers as well as mental health nurses. Together they often do initial assessments of the increasingly common encroachment crimes with which WMP has grappled. As a result of this approach, they have helped to lessen the “demand” on and for traditional crime response units. From the private sector to academia to government, Sims and his team have gone outside their organization to get the information and resources they need.

WMP has leveraged not just partnerships but also technology to harness the power of information. As a substitute for foot patrols, they plan to rely more on mobile communications technology that will allow people to report crimes, cameras that will enable them to monitor possible violations, and a revamped data infrastructure that will allow them to merge and analyze the data they receive. From Sims’ perspective, the plan to embrace data demonstrates the recognition of a foundational truth about the future of policing. “Technology is changing everything,” the chief constable said. “It’s changing public expectations of how they access policing, it’s changing crime itself and again it’s requiring us to be very different in the way we work.”

Finally, Sims has communicated critical information about change to the public and articulated how the public will be able to communicate information to WMP moving forward. Specifically, there have been extensive news reports about the WMP 2020 plan, Sims has directly addressed the importance of public engagement when speaking about the reform, and the plan itself delves into how WMP will transition away from community-based policing. At the moment, WMP has approximately 2,000 officers focused on community policing, a number that will drop dramatically by the time the reform effort is complete. To address this, Sims is creating a digital platform that makes WMP “accessible” to the public and enables citizens both to identify priorities and to “self-serve,” all of which helps to assuage citizen concerns and enables WMP to manage demand more effectively.

The Path Ahead

Whether WMP’s five-year plan proves effective remains to be seen, but what impresses already is that in the face of enormous fiscal difficulties as well as technological and cultural change, Sims has not cowered. Instead, he has embraced this linchpin moment as an opportunity to improve and seized information as a vital ingredient to ensure progress. “The transformation…in this,” Sims says, “is…about how you move from being a very people-intensive organization to one that has to have a whole range of different approaches to do the same job with far less resources.”