UK POLICE TO TACKLE GROOMING GANGS WITH AI TECH- £426,000 of new funding will enter the Tackling Organised Exploitation (TOEX) Programme

The UK government is injecting £426,000 of new funding into the Tackling Organised Exploitation (TOEX) Programme so it can extend access to its Capabilities Environment, a suite of state-of-the-art investigative apps and tools, to every police force in England and Wales, building on the 13 which currently have access.

The TOEX Capabilities Environment expansion supports the first phase of Operation Beaconport, the new national policing operation announced following Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Police officers will be able to access the tools to assist with any criminal investigation in their force

The TOEX Capabilities Environment is already available in all nine regional organised crime units and is being used by 13 forces. These tools have currently been used 12,500 times by the 13 forces which have access to them, saving over £20 million and 16,000 investigator hours. This is expected to increase exponentially with the funded expansion.

With today’s announcement of new funding, all police investigators in England and Wales will have access to the full array of TOEX’s AI-enabled, time-saving tools. These include the Data Analysis and Review Tool, which analyses large amounts of digital data to identify communications patterns and relationships between suspects; and TOEX Translate, a tool for the bulk translation of foreign language text from seized mobile devices.