A 20-week trial to identify London gang members likely to commit violent crimnes has been completed by the Metropolitan Police.

The force used a cloud-based analytics tool developed by Accenture that pulled in data from various crime reporting and criminal intelligence systems used by the police and applied predictive analytics to generate risk scores on the likelihood of known individuals committing violent crimes.

The project targeted known gang members across the whole of London and was delivered by Accenture Analytics, which is part of Accenture Digital.

The unit responsible for investigating gang violence in London, the Met’s Trident Gang Crime Command, led the project.

“The MPS is keen to make smarter use of technology in the fight against crime, ensuring we are intelligence-led at all times,” said Detective Superintendent Tim Champion of the MPS Trident Gang Crime Command.

Accenture said the pilot was the first in the UK to use analytics to discover gang members most likely to commit violent crimes.

“Our goal was to provide MPS with an unprecedented level of insight and intelligence to help them continue to reduce gang-related crimes in the city,” said James Slessor, managing director of Accenture’s policing and public safety business.

“What it does is tell you who are the highest risk individuals that you should target your limited resources against,” Muz Janoowalla, head of public safety analytics at Accenture, told the BBC.

Accenture has developed similar cloud-based projects in other countries. The firm worked in Singapore on CCTV tools to detect patterns in events that could lead to overcrowding and other risks.

Analysts said the latest buzz phrase in the police is “predictive policing”.

“Part of that is about making ICT more about ‘crime fighting’ than ‘crime reporting’ i.e. understanding where, who and when in relation to a potential crime. Analytics gives police a greater chance of achieving this,” said Georgina O’Toole, director at analyst firm TechMarketView.

She added that historically police forces have struggled to take full advantage of the technology they have implemented, often because there has been a failure to transform their organisations and processes at the same time.

“Accenture is also in the process of supporting MPS in the development of its new ICT strategy; we assume that the findings of this pilot will feed into that,” she said.