More Technology
The Met are introducing new technology in a couple of boroughs. This technology consists of inserting a chip into officers’ radios so that control will know where they all are.
Controllers will be able to look on a map & see little icons of all their officers dotted over the map of Kensington & Chelsea. If it’s a success, it will be rolled out around the rest of the force.
It can be really useful, a controller can instantly see who is nearest to any job which comes in. If an officer is in trouble & shouts for emergency assistance or presses their emergency button – especially if they are unable to speak because some thug’s boot is in their mouth – controllers can instantly despatch assistance to a precise location.
The technology has been available for many years. My local taxi firm has been using something like it for ages, as have the ambulance service. It’s interesting when you call ambo control to find out an ETA for an ambo, that their controller says ‘the ambulance is 1.4 miles from the scene’. (that’s just an example of what they say, only when their ambo is 1.4 miles from the scene, obviously, if the ambo is closer or further away, they say something else).
The system has been available for a while within the police service. Mostly, it’s only used to pinpoint police vehicles. So when officers are away from the vehicle, which is quite often, it’s not so useful. For instance, a lot of officers don’t patrol in vehicles, dog handlers can end up a mile or more away from their car on a good track, so personal location systems might be a useful addition to the command & control structure.
It might be really good. On the other hand it might just show one or two little dots around the map of the town with a huge congolmeration of dots spookily close to the where the town’s police station is on the map.
Getting officers to switch the thing on might be a problem, though.
Reactively Proactive says:
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The only problem is you don’t know which it is. A collegue of mine mislaid his radio for a couple of hours. After asking around he came to the conclusion he must have lost it during a previous incident so had control bring it up on the map. It showed his radio was in a house 8 miles away. Just as his arse dropped out, the friendly help desk staff walked in and asked if he had forgotten to pick it up from her desk as it had been buzzing annoyingly with people trying to hear it for the last 2 hours and she was tired of it!!
July 6th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
copper bottom says:
sadly… the only real opposition to GPS in airwave terminals was from police themselves -worried that PSD might use it to spy on us…
July 6th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
R/T says:
Dog handler getting a good track. That’s a good one. Or am I too cynical?! Seriously – once people get over the fact that the DPS Super isn’t going to be sitting in the control room 24/7 I think they’ll have no probs. I’ve worked with guys who didn’t like the “new” PRs because they thought that the skipper would be able to get hold of them more easily (read actually find them at all!!!).
July 7th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Fee says:
The big splodge of colour on the map might, just might, give senior officers a better idea of how much resource is sitting in the station as opposed to out on the streets where the public want to see them. Then they could make better use of the available officers on each shift.
*cough*
Sorry, the new tablets don’t appear to be working. I’ll just go and lie down in a dark room …
July 7th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
SamYeager says:
“The big splodge of colour on the map might, just might, give senior officers a better idea of how much resource is sitting in the station as opposed to out on the streets where the public want to see them.”
Regrettably it’s all too likely that only the officers on response will have to use it so the other 90% of police officers won’t appear on the map.
July 7th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
copper bottom says:
samyeager is right…
cid? community officers? PCSO?
let’s face it- response officers are widely thought of (not by me..) as being the ‘rubbing rag’ of the old bill…
how many times have you heard that old chestnut- ’sorry, you are being put into uniform for being a bad boy’?
it’s insulting…
July 8th, 2009 at 7:31 am