Surrey police fight crime with networked 'whiteboards'

When they said 'do away with paperwork' they didn't mean replace it with virtual paperwork...

Surrey Police Force has done away with paper-based flip charts and has installed a set of networked interactive 'whiteboards' throughout the county. Surrey's boys in blue have invested in 15 networked Hitachi StarBoards as part of a county-wide corporate briefing system. The move comes as part of the force's involvement in the National Intelligence Model (NIM), an information share project to get all UK police forces linked up together on a local, regional and national basis. The board can be edited in a similar way to any other white board to produce diagrams for briefings - with the added advantage of it being networked across the county to enable combined operations to run more smoothly. Officers can also run PowerPoint presentations via the boards, which can include pictures of suspects and maps of crime scenes for example. The information is then presented to other police officers attending three daily briefing sessions. The presentation is also converted to html and made available on the Surrey Police intranet for those officers unable to attend the briefings.