An Automated Text Mining Approach for Classifying Mental-Ill Health Incidents from Police Incident Logs for Data-Driven Intelligence

Data-driven intelligence can play a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of police service provision. Despite of police organizations being a rich source of qualitative data (present in less formally structured formats, such as the text logs), little work has been done in automating steps to allow this data to feed into intelligence-led policing tasks, such as demand analysis/prediction. This paper examines the use of police incident logs to better estimate the demand of officers across all incidents, with particular respect to the cases where mental-ill health played a primary part. Persons suffering from mental-ill health are significantly more likely to come into contact with the police, but statistics relating to how much actual police time is spent dealing with this type of incident are highly variable and often subjective. We present a novel deep learning based text mining approach, which allows accurate extraction of mental-ill health related incidents from police incident logs. The data gained from these automated analyses can enable both strategic and operational planning within police forces, allowing policy makers to develop long term strategies to tackle this issue, and to better plan for day-today demand on services. The proposed model has demonstrated the cross-validated classification accuracy of 89.5% on the real dataset.