Case Study: West Midlands Police achieves a single, accurate view of records and faster searches with SAS Data Management

Using technology to keep the community safe

West Midlands Police, the UK’s second-largest force serving more than 2.6 million people across Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, faced a critical data-quality challenge: aliases, false birth dates, typos and missing fields left officers with incomplete or duplicate records and forced lengthy manual searches—an issue that could compromise public and officer safety.

The force implemented SAS Data Management for data cleansing and fuzzy matching, quickly aggregating 14 million records from 13 systems into 4 million accurate nominal records. The solution was easy to deploy, enabled single searches across sources, sped up investigations, and added controls for record retention—freeing officers to spend less time behind screens and more time policing.

West Midlands Police

Corinne Brazier

Records Manager