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Blackberry enhances police efficiency and productivity
The ten crime car officers that already have BlackBerrys will have 3,300 more productive hours at their disposal, or the equivalent of two officers
Mobile access to Niche RMS is estimating savings of over £630,000 in manpower hours for North Wales Police Service. The BAPCO Journal takes a closer look at the pilot project, which has equipped officers with BlackBerrys...
A pilot project equipping North Wales Police officers with BlackBerry mobile devices has proven so successful that its deployment is being increased. The devices are networked to North Wales Police’s Niche Records Management System (RMS), allowing officers to swiftly access crucial information and identify and apprehend criminals. Test results show that crime car officers and community beat managers spend 53 minutes and 27 minutes more on the streets per shift, fighting crime, than in the office doing paperwork.
In 2002, North Wales Police implemented Niche RMS, the police information management system that brings together all aspects of operational policing in one unified system. One of the key reasons the force chose Niche RMS was the potential for combining the system with portable technology, such as the Blackberry. Earlier this year, 300 BlackBerrys were distributed to a mix of users. Based on the pilot project’s success, additional BlackBerrys are being deployed.
improving productivity
Sergeant Aled Eynon, quality assurance officer on the BlackBerry project comments, “Experience of trying to mobilise our information over the past few years leads us to believe that with BlackBerry, we are now able to provide officers in North Wales with a first class product and clearly, RMS is at the heart of this.
“The ten crime car officers that already have BlackBerrys will have 3,300 more productive hours at their disposal, or the equivalent of two officers. Based on the time saved by community beat officers being able to access Niche RMS while on the streets, the introduction of the devices will save the force an estimated £636,000, or 29,000 productive hours. Police visibility and crime solving rates have improved and the North Wales Police force looks forward to continued success.”
“Niche RMS is unique in giving operational officers access to all the information they need to more effectively do their job – preventing and detecting crime,” says John James, Director of Operations and Business Development for Niche Technology Inc. “Combining it with mobile data solutions such as BlackBerrys provides enhanced access to that information and delivers information where operational staff need it most – on the street.”
North Wales Police has three main goals with its mobile data access initiative. Firstly to get officers out of the station and onto the street; Secondly, a reduction in travel time, as police no longer have to trek back to the office to search records or to enter reports; and thirdly to aid more effective, information-led policing.
Already a pioneer as the first UK force to implement Niche RMS, North Wales has one of the widest deployments of the system in the UK, covering intelligence, criminal and non-criminal incidents, warrants, child protection, case file preparation and custody, as well as electronic transmission of data to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Right from the early days of the North Wales Police’s BlackBerry test, officers were experiencing success with combined Niche RMS/BlackBerry technology: North Wales Police’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) squad’s ability to use a BlackBerry to pull up a photo stored on Niche RMS revealed that a female driver was not the innocent person she claimed to be, but was in fact disqualified from driving. The arrest is an excellent demonstration of the revolutionary benefits promised by increased mobility of access to Niche RMS: in previous years, officers would have had to return to the station with the suspect in order to verify her identity.
