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When Andy Willmer was a police officer between 1998 and 2010, he says crime was relatively simple. The majority of offences reported to the police happened in public places such as streets.
In the years since, there has been a sharp change, according to Willmer, now policing lead for the UK, Europe, Middle East and Africa for the consultancy Deloitte.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales showed theft and violent crime in the year to June 2025 had declined to only a quarter of the level 30 years earlier. An increased willingness to report offences such as rape, meanwhile, has meant that the number of sexual offences reported to police is 3.7 times higher than in 2003. Online fraud and computer misuse have also emerged since 2017 as serious issues.
It is one of the biggest challenges for Willmer and other management consultants working with police forces to help them understand the revolutionary implications of the shift. Forces not only need to deploy their officers differently, but also need very distinct investigative skills.
Willmer says that during his policing career, most offences occurred in public places such as streets and parks. “Now, the majority of crime happens online or in private spaces.”
Management Consultancies Association chief executive Tamzen Isacsson says that, on top of the changes in demand, UK police forces have for years had to deal with outdated information technology and severe cultural problems. They have faced accusations of racism and misogyny, particularly after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by Wayne Couzens, then a serving Metropolitan Police officer.
Isacsson says: “Consultants have played a vital role in helping police forces modernise — upgrading critical technology, improving efficiency and reducing costs so more funding can go . . . [to] frontline policing.”
Blair Gibbs, director of the think-tank Police Foundation, says public bodies’ attitudes to hiring consultants have also changed. He says organisations increasingly demand that consultancies not only analyse their problems, but also help them implement solutions — such as new IT systems — that will address the issues identified. “Consulting in the [criminal justice] sector is much more about . . . we’ll come in and support you; we’ll maybe have some kind of gain share; we’ll be paid that based on what we can show we’ve delivered.”
Forces have struggled in recent years to understand demand for their services and to manage it. It is vital to rank emergency calls so that staff can differentiate quickly between those where a caller’s life might be at risk and the huge numbers that are hoaxes, made by mistake or are from people with mental health problems.
Willmer says Deloitte has had particular success with helping one client to understand calls to 101 — the number that UK forces encourage the public to use in non-emergency situations. “The calls are recorded and we’ve helped them use artificial intelligence to transcribe those calls and take the data from them using AI tools,” he says.
The transcripts are then analysed to learn how best to handle calls.
“We’ve been helping them to make better interventions, helping them to understand vulnerability in things like domestic abuse,” says Willmer.
Consultants have also had an important role in ensuring that forces’ operational data is available to frontline officers. Forces typically work with multiple different databases, often incompatible with each other, maintained by different local, national or international bodies.
Many forces have turned to software such as Qlik Sense, which offers officers a quick summary of the threat posed by a person they encounter, or whether the person is highly vulnerable.
Willmer says many of the latest systems exploit AI software. As an example, he says it might ensure a custody sergeant at a police station has readily understandable information about all of a suspect’s past interactions with police. That could influence whether the force asks for the person to be held in custody while awaiting trial, or is allowed bail.
“It’s not about automation or AI replacing what people are doing,” says Willmer. “It’s about giving them tools with the right information faster in order to make better decisions.”
However, the Police Foundation’s Gibbs says recent events have also created a new uncertainty for firms seeking to work with police forces in England and Wales. In a white paper published last month, home secretary Shabana Mahmood vowed to overhaul the service’s structure to address many of the issues that consultants are helping forces to tackle.
She has pledged to create a new National Police Service for England and Wales that will take over some onerous tasks such as combating terrorism from local forces. The reform is intended to free up their resources to tackle local issues such as antisocial behaviour and shoplifting. Mahmood will also press for a “significant” reduction in the number of territorial forces from the current 43.
The changes present the risk that consultants in future could have far fewer individual potential customers among police forces. However, Gibbs anticipates that many will see such a big revamp as an opportunity: “I would think that the Big Four [Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC] consultants are quite keen to engage with the national police reform plans.”
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