Police mobiles cautioned for bad behaviour
£75m well spent?
Despite a £75m government plan to roll out 25,000 mobile devices to police forces nationwide by 2010, the majority of forces remain unable to take full advantage of mobile tech.
According to Jan Berry, the Home Office-appointed independent advocate for reducing police bureaucracy, handheld deployments are failing to live up to expectations.
"Police officers are frustrated that they believed they would have a handheld device that would automatically connect you to the Police National Computer, tell you what's on the command and control computer, that's got GPS, that has got the offenders register and all the rest of it.
"There's very few forces and officers who have access to that type of information on a handheld device, let alone the connectivity within their area to be able to access that information at a speed that would be acceptable," she told the recent GovNet Modernising Justice Through IT event.
Berry, whose advice will be used to help form government policy on cutting bureaucracy, added that back office systems are crippling the usefulness of mobile rollouts.
She told the conference that many forces "did not necessarily have the systems within their own forces for that mobile technology to be fully beneficial from the start" leading to a situation where "some forces are far further along that road than others".
The Home Office claims that mobile devices are cutting time officers spend doing paperwork at the station, citing the Birmingham force where handhelds have helped reduce the time taken for stop and searches from 20 minutes to 60 seconds, while National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) CIO Richard Earland recently told silicon.com that handheld devices would transform UK policing within three years.
By March of this year 26,188 handheld devices were being used by police forces across the country.
However, some forces are reporting difficulties with their mobile deployments.
In Staffordshire, where the force has almost finished rolling out handhelds to 1,800 operational officers, police are having some difficulties connecting to the system.
Chairman of the Staffordshire Police Federation inspector Mark Judson told silicon.com: "One of the problems we have had is with connections going down, which can be frustrating for officers when they are half way through something and they have to log back in.
"The other thing is that the connection can be quite slow as well.
"I am sure in the fullness of time we will have a Rolls Royce service [but] because it is new there are all sorts of teething problems."
Staffordshire began trialling the use of handhelds among its officers more than five years ago but increased the speed of its rollout after winning a £3.8m grant from the NPIA last year.
Judson said officers have access to about six police systems from the devices, including the Police National Computer and systems dealing with crime reporting and live incident updates.
A spokesman for the NPIA said "the level of capability does vary force to force", adding this is down to suitability of IT systems, training and "organisational decisions".
The NPIA's grants for police forces to get mobile devices includes funding to help build back office systems, according to the spokesman: "Within that package there is support so they can get up to speed and take advantage of mobile tech," he said.