Code blue for police challenge

Chief Constable Ian Hopkins

Greater Manchester Police is looking to young people to crunch data to help tackle the problem of missing people.

The Force is one of the organisations taking part in this year’s Hack Manchester junior hacks on Monday and Tuesday this week and the senior hack at the weekend.

Between April 2015 and March 2016, GMP dealt with 24,677 missing incidents involving more than 12,000 people and 36 per cent of missing people were children.

A selection of anonymised data related to missing people has been provided to the teams involved in the event to see what creative solutions may be developed.

Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said: “It is the first time we have been involved and I hope that as well as developing vital digital skills the young people might find a way to help us.

“We tie up a huge amount of time and resources to track people down and any ideas on how to better manage this will be welcome.”

The same data will be provided to the two day adult Hackathon that takes place through Saturday and Sunday this week.

Hack Manchester is a 24-hour coding competition with teams turning up with an idea and 24 hours later have a working product. It is taking place at the Museum of Science and Industry as part of the Manchester Science Festival.

The GMP challenge has been sponsored by The LADbible – a fast growing media company based in Manchester.