Police stick to beat with PDAs
British Transport Police officers to trial mobile devices to report crime
British Transport Police (BTP) officers have become the first foot patrols in the country to file official reports on the move, allowing them to stay out on the beat longer.
The system is being tested by 150 officers on the London Underground and is expected to be rolled out across the country’s main railway crime hotspots next year.
A number of police forces have mobile systems for checking sources such as the Police National Computer and intelligence databases, but the BTP pilot also lets officers use handheld devices with mobile printers to file the ‘stop and account’ reports needed to record every encounter.
In the past officers filled out a paper form, gave one copy to the subject and recorded the details on force databases when they returned to the station.
Enabling officers to complete the process on the beat is saving an average of one hour per eight-hour shift, says BTP chief information officer Andrew Watson.
‘Nothing I have ever seen has had this kind of impact on operational policing,’ said Watson.
‘Other forces have mobile data, often in police vehicles, and some have read-only handheld devices. Our officers have the ability to write to the database and print from it too,’ he said.
The system is also improving the quality of the data held in BTP systems because officers are including more details in their electronic reports.
‘Information is being put in with a view to how useful it will be in the future. Reports used to be rather scant because officers had their own hard copies to refer to,’ said Watson.
In designing the project the BTP focused on the functional requirements rather than the technical specification.
‘We wanted to give our officers a solution that mirrors manual processes but with equipment that is less bulky to carry around than the paperwork,’ said Watson.
The project uses software from Beat Systems on O2 PDAs with mobile printers, using the commercial GPRS network.
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