Staffordshire Police to be handed tablets in £500,000 project

Tablets would free up about 5,000 hours a week or the equivalent of 100 extra officers, claims police and crime commissioner

Staffordshire Police are to begin using tablets this year in a new project that is expected to cost the force half a million pounds.

The rollout, which is due to start in March, will "fundamentally transform" policing, according to police and crime commissioner Matthew Ellis, who was speaking to the local press.

Ellis claimed that using tablets to access and input data would free up about 5,000 hours a week - or the equivalent of 100 extra officers.

He suggested that currently, front-line officers spend about six out of every 10 hours in communities, rather than at police stations, and that this would increase to nine out of 10 hours when tablets are introduced.

Ellis also believes that the use of mobile technology will help to reduce inaccuracies in reports, and ensure that reports are always completed.

"It's about police being given more time to do what they want to be doing and what the public want them to be doing, which is out-and-about policing," he said.

Officers would also save time as they would write statements - of which the force receives about 200,000 a year - directly on to tablets and then upload them on to a central server, rather than having to take a statement on paper and later transcribe this on up to six different systems.

As well as front-line officers, investigators will also be issued with tablets.

It is unknown whether Staffordshire Police will be offering iPads, Android tablets or Windows 8 tablets to the force, or whether it will take a device-agnostic approach.

Ellis believes that introducing tablets is necessary as current police technology in the UK is not good enough.

"It's not what you'd expect in nearly 2015. So a radical overhaul of the way technology is used, the way it works, will fundamentally improve policing and get more police out and about for more of the time," he stated.

The use of tablets is part of the force's technology and IT systems overhaul, which is expected to cost £46m over the next seven years.