Wiltshire
Policeis helping its officers spend more time
on the beat and at crime scenes by giving them remote access to its
information systems.
The force is redesigning the systems so its crime-fighters can
use a £2m
service oriented architecture (SOA) as an interface to a dozen
applications. Matt Bennion-Pedley, Wiltshire's financial director,
said that this would allow the force to make its data mobile.
The system is being developed by India-based
HCL Technologies. It will
provide police officers with remote access to administrative and
investigative tools such as intelligence systems, the Police
National Database, vehicle and criminal records, and photographic
files.
Remote access to the police DNA and fingerprint databases may
come later, along with the ability to scan and compare fingerprints
on the street.
It will also enable the force to send messages and alerts to
officers in the field, and have more information to hand when they
respond to incidents.
Bennion-Pedley said the force had found that the time spent by
police officers travelling between crime scenes and the station to
look up information or report progress cost the force 6.5% of its
£100m budget.
"If we can save just a couple of percent, we'll have paid for
the system," he said.
Police officers will be able to use laptops, personal digital
assistants and web-enabled mobile phones to access intelligence and
report progress via GPRS and/or the emergency services'
Airwave network.
"The idea is to develop a history of an incident as if it were a
[multimedia] storybook," Bennion-Pedley said. "Most police officers
joined up to fight crime, not do paperwork, so they have welcomed
the system."
The SOA design provided security, continuity and resilience
against technology changes, Bennion-Pedley said. It insulates the
applications themselves, making it easier to develop interfaces for
new terminals and applications.
Police IT systems must interact better >>