Leadent featured in the Sunday Times - 29.10.2006
" Bobbies stay on the beat with high tech" Sunday Times, 29th October 2006
New kit means that police officers won't have to spend so much time at the station, says Mary Braid
As part of the effort to increase police visibility, the government has come up with another pledge-that eventually every British citizen will know the name of his local Bobby. Wiltshire police intend to fulfil that Dixon of Dock Green promise through a high-tech revolution.
It's not the first time, of course, that technology has been hailed as the miracle answer to a problem, only for it to disappoint.
Industrial psychologist David Jones of Leadent, a management consultancy that is helping Wiltshire design its new mobile and remote working system, points out that not everything about the 1980s technology revolution made policing more efficient.
When officers get nostalgic-or swing the blue lamp as they say-they talk fondly about the days when they would take their paperwork out with them on patrol,” said Jones. “They would park on a roundabout, pull out the briefcase and do their paperwork while they waited for a radio call. At least they were visible while they did it. After the arrival of desk-top computer systems, they had to go back to the office to do it.
With many companies - and millions of ordinary citizens - having already 'gone mobile', politicians have complained that the police, facing new terrorism threats and pressures to improve inter-force information systems, are years behind.
Now forces across the country are in the middle of their second technological revolution-one that aims to give officers on patrol the technological aids and information systems that are available at their stations.
Jones has been helping Wiltshire with its efforts for the past three months. However, he hasn't been near a systems supplier yet. He argues that a problem with the many failed technology projects-in both the private and public sectors-is that they start with computer systems, not people. The result is often a solution that does not make life any easier for employees and is not liked, and so not often used.
He and Wiltshire's finance director, Matt Bennion-Pedley, are convinced that by starting with the ordinary copper and not the gadgets being pushed for sale, they will come up with a mobile system that really will put more policemen on patrol and improve frontline services.
The calculations on the relationship between police desk work and increased visibility are certainly attractive. A previous management study for the force suggested a quarter of police time was spent doing paperwork and that, if a mere 1% of desk work were cut, 16,000 extra hours of police time would be created.
Bennion-Pedley is sure that an investment of £1.5m - out of an annual force budget of £100m - in a mobile system will yield extra police hours worth many millions of pounds.
After consultation with police officers, and a period of shadowing on patrol, Jones said that officers will be freed from the station only by a system that really does allow them to pick up tasks, access intelligence reports and complete forms while on patrol.
Wiltshire has spent a lot of time analysing what its officers actually do and what they need to increase their frontline activities. Jones admits that the benefit of a technology-driven approach, used by some other forces, is that officers end up using new technology far more quickly. But he warns that, in the longer term, fingers are often burnt.
Our approach is task-centred and user-focused. We didn’t even talk about the technology before we discussed what it is that keeps officers in the station, what keeps bringing them back and which officers were particularly affected.
Jones argues that this approach prevents common-sense assumptions leading to the wrong conclusions- and solutions. For example, if there is no proper consultation with officers on the ground and a senior officer says that beat officers don't need access to the police national computer then they won't get it even if they need it.
Proper consultation also throws up factors that might not otherwise be considered. For example, it is not merely straight-forward operational matters that keep officers at the station. There is a social dimension, especially for officers who spend a lot of time working on their own.
"Loneliness has emerged as a factor and it can be nice to hover round the coffee machine", says Jones. "I am not sure how we respond to that yet, but it is in the report. The solution we come up with will also have to take into account that officers keep in touch with what's happening in the force by listening to their radios. More text information could increase feelings of isolation. "
Wiltshire is now set to go to suppliers with a clear idea of its technological needs and a confidence that whatever solution it opts for will truly meet the needs of the officers.
The Home Office is promoting all sorts of measures to free up police time-from the replacement of old-style identity parades with time-saving video parades to increase the number of community support officers-but Bennion-Pedley says none is more important than the mobile and remote-working technology initiatives. p
North Wales police are front runners in remote and mobile technology systems. According to deputy chief constable Clive Wolfendale, only in the past 12 months have really efficient mobile solutions become available to police forces. High-speed 3G technology can now deliver fast enough the information needed by police officers on the beat and on patrol.
"The first generation of handheld devices was not up to scratch and even a year ago there was a lot of frustration for officers who would have to wait for minutes for information like an identity check to arrive through a handheld device,” said Wolfendale. Waiting that time while holding a suspect is potentially dangerous.
Wolfendale said that all the technology solutions his force had opted for in the past five years had been focused on what police officers said they needed. "However, once we know what we need, we always go for a commercial, off-the-shelf solution."
"We have never tried to reinvent the wheel or come up with an in-house tailor-made system, as you see happening in government departments all the time. Instead, we have scoured the world for the right solution. Policing is policing-whether it is in North Wales or Chicago."
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