Police seek rail passenger data to try to catch out criminals

TRAIN passengers could have their journeys tracked under plans by the British Transport Police (BTP) to catch criminals.

Lucy D’orsi, BTP’S chief constable, said she was in talks with rail companies on how they could share data with police on people’s journeys to help track and identify criminals through unusual travel patterns.

She suggested this could be a predatory sex offender or thief spending an inordinate amount of time on the London Underground without tapping out, or a county lines drug dealer making a 440-mile round trip from London to Liverpool without spending any time in the northern city.

In an interview with Policing TV that airs today, she denied it was the police acting like a “Big Brother” state but recognised that there were “civil rights and liberty aspects” to it. “We’re not really looking for your data,” she told interviewer Danny Shaw.

“We’re looking for the data of the predatory sex offender. So we’re looking for anomalous behaviour. We’re not looking for you as an individual, we’re looking at the behaviour trends.

“Then the behaviour trends help us to put it into the system to understand where we need to focus our policing.”

Ms D’orsi said BTP was in talks with Transport for London to “explore” how travel data could be used in a “proportionate” way to help police fight crime.

“There is a missed opportunity to look at how we can use data in a better way so we need data sharing agreements. This is what we’re working through at the moment as to how we can and how we can use our data sharing agreements,” she said.

“An example I gave recently is somebody who’s travelling the underground for six hours. Why are they travelling? So they tap in? And they tap out six hours later? Why is that? Possibly lost, possibly vulnerable, possibly a pickpocket, a predatory sex offender?

“At the moment, you know, we’re all looking for these individuals, whether it be from a crime perspective or vulnerability perspective.

“Another example is somebody who takes a train from London to Liverpool, and gets the return train back straightaway. That’s just not normal. That’s just not what people do. So why is somebody doing that?

“That could be county lines, somebody’s dropping some drugs up there, and then coming back down to London. So how can we just look more broadly at what the data is telling us and then make the choices of whether we want to use that data or not?”