Mobile policing: More than just access to information

For over 30 years policing has followed a model of ‘siloed’ digital solutions, with frontline officers often reliant on a variety of products from multiple vendors.

Before this, little had changed in policing for over two centuries apart from the introduction of the personal radio in the 1960s. Officers were arguably more mobile in the days of the Bow Street Runners and Dixon of Dock Green than many are today, because they carried everything they needed with them. The modern officer, by contrast, spends over two hours a day behind a desk out of sight of the public.

A critical question today is not just whether an officer can ingest or submit information in the field, but how they can do so without duplication. If you are not reusing data then you are increasing effort, demoralising staff and potentially creating data integrity issues by introducing human errors.

To address this, Motorola Solutions’ Pronto digital policing platform streamlines data to flow between systems. Cutting the umbilical cord between officer and station, Pronto transforms workflow efficiency via a single user interface that’s accessible anywhere – with or without connectivity.

In a mobile policing context ‘business as usual’ means ‘continuous development’. Now used by over 65,000 UK police officers in 24 forces, the use of Pronto is constantly being driven in innovative new directions, always driven by close collaboration between end users and strategic portfolio leads.

Digital policing: how does Pronto pass the test?

Test 1 – will it be adopted?

Police officers are excellent problem solvers. They know where they want to get to, and they often excel at making dynamic decisions to get there. If you introduce something new it must be as good as what officers already have… or they will simply find a way to get the same result without it.

In the case of mobility this means lots of bottom drawers full of devices. I remember going into a class of mostly young new recruits who had just received Pronto training. The only question they had for me was, “Why didn’t you give us this last week instead of that week we spent on desktop applications?” Should that really surprise us today? And the solution needs to support the way officers access, capture, complete and submit information. Starting life as a ‘systems thinking’ initiative in Lothian and Borders Police twenty years ago, Pronto was designed by operational PCs and Sergeants from their own personal perspective.

Test 2 – Can officers work offline?

Police officers are expected to operate anywhere, in any conditions and any time. In forces with rural areas this might mean miles of road without connectivity. In urban areas, who has not been in a hospital or flats where there are similar issues? Can you still access the CAD details you were sent before you arrived on scene? Are your officers having to manually save inputted data frequently? You only have to lose it once and you won’t do it again. That bottom drawer is filling up!

Test 3 – Can all data be reused every time?

Is CAD data always available to your officers? And are they able to reuse POLE data in workflows with the click of a button? When they deal with a suspect, can they conduct federated searches of PNC, RMS, Voters register, biometrics fingerprints and OIFR and reuse the results? Or are they writing everything out four times or more? The risk of duplication (apart from inefficiency and frustration) is that data integrity is compromised.

Test 4 – Do officers have everything they need?

I learned early on as the person responsible for enabling mobility in a force that it is not enough to give them some capability. You have to give them everything they need in a process. If they can only do some of it, they will just come back to do all of it. Might need more bottom drawers!

Test 5 – Are your strategic aims supported?

Making it intuitive with commonly used picklists and learned validation certainly helps adoption, but what about those strategic needs? Are your officers filling out those vital fields needed for the Home Office Annual Data Return ADR on every occasion? Pronto’s colour coded mandated fields and in-field validation make it right the first time every time. When policy changes dynamically, can your RMS or CAD give you those changes required in two weeks?

Test 6 – Do you risk additional data integrity issues?

Duplicate addresses and nominals are simply dangerous, important information can be overlooked not to mention the implications for MOPI etc. WYP recently resolved issues in their RMS through Pronto by automated searching, validation and reuse across systems. But not content to stop duplicates, it also detects and sets a course to resolve legacy duplicates.

Test 7 – How easy is training?

One of the issues of having multiple systems is that each requires its own training programme. With Pronto the view across PNC, CAD, RMS etc is the same. When we introduce new workflows, the title is often all officers need to adopt it. These can be as diverse as biometrics, telephone statements or case files. Remember that class of new recruits?

Test 8 – Is it also their pocketbook?

Do all the capabilities in Tests 1 – 7 end up as links in your officers’ electronic pocketbooks? Can they update a CAD or RMS record and their PNB with one entry and provide a hyperlink back to it? Can they add sketch plans, signatures and multiple photographs to their entries? Can your SIO’s search millions of PNB entries in minutes?

Delivering tangible benefits

With a steady increase in the adoption of Pronto, a number of our customers have invested in their own independent or in-house research to assess the platform’s value. The results consistently show three things:

• Valued by officers. Pronto is often cited as ‘the best IT system ever made available to frontline staff’ – social media quickly confirms what officers are saying about it.
• Efficiency savings. Forces are reporting operational efficiency gains, both in the frontline and in the back office. This isn’t just down to individual workflows, but how apps are orchestrated in an entire end-to-end solution – something that a siloed technology approach cannot deliver.
• Improved visibility of officers to the public. Forces equipped with Pronto generally do not have officers in stations during the shift for two hours at a time or incurring overtime at the end of a shift. Officers using Pronto are often the ones going home on time!

In further articles in this series we’ll be diving deeper in Pronto functionality and integration with local and national systems. Stay tuned to find out more.

Join us at BAPCO, where we will be showcasing our connected car on stand C1 on the 7 and 8 March.