PDAs keep Staffordshire Police on the beat

Staffordshire Police is providing mobile computers to officers to help them spend more time on the beat and report crime from the street.

Sixty officers are using GPRS-enabled Panasonic Toughbooks, providing secure remote access to the force's applications and the Police National Computer (PNC).

'Our initial aim is to increase the visibility of police officers in the community by 10 per cent, which equates to a saving of 44 man-years of office time,' said Staffordshire Police project manager Ian De Soyza.

'We've been working to get our police officers back into the community, and to be more visible, under an initiative we've called Project Reassurance,' he said.

The constabulary investigated several technologies before making its decision.

'Whatever solution we came up with had to be simple, stable and above all, secure. It was also crucial not to have any data stored on the device in case it gets lost or stolen,' said De Soyza.

Following field trials last December, the force settled on the Panasonic device, using Citrix MetaFrame technology connecting across a private Orange network.

More applications are continually being added, helping to make officers increasingly less reliant on coming into the station. The mobile computers give them the ability to search crime databases, and provide better communications to the command and control centre.

'One of the great things about being able to do PNC checks from the scene is that you don't have to wait for radio airspace, you just run the check yourself over the GPRS network,' said incident management unit Sergeant Dave Edge.

'Enquiries come back in seconds and officers get access to much more data than could ever be passed over the radio in the same time,' he said.

De Soyza hopes to provide up to 2,000 officers with devices before the end of 2004.