Cracking County Lines: The South Wales Police Approach

Reducing reliance on analysts was a key driver for adopting the CIS. Its intuitive, self-serve tools, empower frontline roles to interpret data directly. Previously, they either waited for analysts to review data or tried to interpret it manually, both causing delays and limiting insight.

Now, enquiries progress in real time, while analysts are freed to focus on higher-level interpretation, pattern recognition, complex problem-solving, and the production of strategic intelligence. With analysts often stretched by workload and major incidents, the CIS ensures their skills are focused where they have the most impact.

Through its ‘Collections’ portal, the CIS automatically uploads, indexes, and makes vast volumes of data searchable, including communications, handset downloads, and structured or unstructured files like Excel, Word, and PDFs.

South Wales Police centralises suspect data from production orders, transcripts, and internal files. The real power of Collections lies in its cross-search capability. It allows users to query any uploaded data against everything else in the portal. This has been a game changer for the force, uncovering previously unknown connections across crimes such as murder, child sexual and criminal exploitation, robbery, burglary, and more.

Collections has often uncovered evidence from past investigations, linking phones and communications data to suspects linked in current serious offences. While this information already existed, there was no systematic way to access or analyse it. By surfacing these connections, Collections turns previously siloed data into actionable intelligence.

Since adopting the CIS, BCU teams identify county lines activity much more efficiently. The intelligence they produce is often strong enough to support more intrusive tactics against controllers. The CIS clearly evidences criminality, such as high-value phone numbers across multiple areas, supporting applications for further authorities and use of investigative tactics.

Its effectiveness has reshaped tasking and escalation, ensuring controllers receive proper focus. CIS intelligence is so robust that arrests often recover drugs, cash, and phones, with 90% of suspects pleading guilty at the first hearing. It has transformed the force’s county lines response, making operations faster, more precise, and highly effective.