Next, a look at some of the major challenges police forces in Wales (and the UK more generally) continue to face or have had to adapt to more recently.
The growth of the internet and increased digital connectivity have presented more opportunities for fraudsters, organised crime and abusers.
At one scale, the police are often left to deal with the vacuum social media and big tech companies have left in moderating their platforms – particularly when it comes to online harassment. Naturally, there will be a big jump from someone being mean on Twitter to child abuse, but more often than not it’s left to the police and the likes of the National Crime Agency (and its branches like CEOP) to deal with it.
For a long time online fraud has been fairly unsophisticated – emails from representatives of Nigerian princes etc. – but it’s getting harder and harder to tell genuine emails and communications from fraudulent ones. There are relatively new or brute force methods like ransomware, DDoS and phishing.
In May 2021, Action Fraud reported a massive increase in the number of fake cold calls from seemingly legitimate numbers. While these are still relatively blunt tools that can be easily seen through (“You are being investigated by HMRC” robo-voices), to someone unfamiliar with them they may be frightening.
How the police deal with this is a difficult question to answer. There are some messaging services and social networks that are completely private and encrypted end-to-end, making it far easier for criminals to operate. They usually only get caught if they’re already known to the authorities – such as registered sex offenders breaching conditions. That naturally has to be balanced with a right to privacy.
At the very top end, you have threats to national security by organised – sometimes state-sponsored – hacking groups. Like it or not, the likes of Russia are winning that war at the moment.
