15 November 2004

UK police forces

UK police forces are highly dependent on community policing provided by beat officers and vehicle patrols to increase visibility as a deterent to crime. Delivering information between the mobile officer and the control centre is presently undertaken via an analog radio system.  Communicating in this form has highlighted serious limitations interms of capacity, security and efficiency.  Scottish Police Information Strategy – SPIS – is working with Beat Systems to resolve these growing problems using a unique combination of Beat Systems technology and the newly introduced TETRA Airwave radio network currently being rolled out by all UK police forces.

The Problem...

Increased and complex community policing has generated more officers on the beat who require greater access information held centrally on police national databases.  The capacity for dealing with this constant stream of requests from patrol officers has highlighted major operational problems. Contending for central resources to search databases and relay information by radio back to the enquiring officer is an increasing demand placed upon all control operations.  This process involves two tiers of staff and several operational stages to provide a single piece of information to the beat officer.  This generates ineficiency, time delays and security issues that compromise the integrity of the operation, a problem faced by all UK police forces.

The Solution...

Providing a system that enables an officer on the beat to directly access the police national computer – PNC- would alleviate contention for central resources and drastically improve operational efficiency. Beat Systems, working closely with SPIS, developed a robust architecture, design and software that enables a beat officer to directly access PNC whilst on the beat. Using any PDA device incorporated with Beat Systems end-to-end solution, queries and searches can be carried out uniquely over the Airwave network to PNC by an officer on the beat.  Vehicle, person or premises enquiries can be undertaken by any officer irrespective of their locality using Beat Systems technology as detailed below.  Voice recognition can also be used for lone officer working to aid the speed and logistics of enquiries.  

The Results...

SPIS are able to confirm the performance of the solution under test and operational conditions, acknowledge the success of the system and the potential it has in the police market.

Airwave, in recognising the success of the system, formally requested for the system to be present in their Airwave test labs as the demonstration kit highlighting the benefits of using Airwave with Beat Systems solution.

Ivan Brown, Director of SPIS believes ‘ Beat Systems has developed a powerful and strategic mobile solution incorporating several critical technologies including Airwave, GPRS and 802.11. Their voice recognition software coupled with platform, bearer and hardware independence, places the company in a strong position to serve the police markets.’

Jayish Patel, Airwave Project Manager for 02, confirms ‘Beat Systems mobile technology has been successfully tested in our Rugby test labs with the latest released version of Airwave. As such we are pleased to have Beat Systems mobile technology as part of our demonstration kit showing the versatility of Airwave with Beat Systems mobile solution.’