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• Public Sector

By Natasha Lomas, 20 October 2009 12:31

NEWS

Getting chewed - and eaten - by dogs. Getting run over by cars. And Land Rovers.

It's not an easy life being a police BlackBerry out on the mean streets.

"Nothing is copper-proof," Keith Gough, mobile information manager for Thames Valley Police told silicon.com. "Police officers are not delicate flowers."

And yet - increasing numbers of police are using sophisticated hardware on the beat. The government has committed £80m to ramp up police smartphone use by funding the deployment of 30,000 mobile data devices by 2010 - with the Home Office's plan being to increase police visibility in communities by easing the bureaucracy burden.

The thinking goes: if database checks can be made, and information at least entered on a mobile handset and sent securely back to police systems, the officer can remain for longer where they are most wanted: out on the beat.

The number of mobile data devices currently deployed to police is around 39,000, with an even split between forces that have chosen BlackBerrys and those that have plumped for other mobile data devices such as Windows Mobile phones.

With the extra government cash, this is likely to rise to somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 devices in circulation. There are roughly 76,000 officers in patrol and neighbourhood policing roles.

The impact of mobile technology on policing was the topic at a RIM-sponsored roundtable where speakers including Gough discussed the benefits police get from their mobile devices.

But just because a device has been handed over to a police officer doesn't mean it's actually being used, as inspector Jim Hitch of Bedfordshire Police explained. "We monitor usage and we're running at about 80 to 85 per cent."

Hitch said the older generation of police officers don't always take to the BlackBerrys. "A lot of people really have trouble with the keyboard," he said. "A lot of people have trouble understanding how it all works. We put a lot of effort into the training but it's really not just the physical training of doing it, it's actually then keeping that going and making sure that people use the devices."

"This is not really a technology project," Hitch added. "The technology is there and in many ways that's the easy bit - what this is is a people project. This is about cultural change. This is about getting people to work differently. This is about getting people who have never really used a mobile phone for anything other than answering calls and making calls to actually do their day to day job on a small, tiny in some cases, PDA.

"There's a lot of culture to overcome."

Bedfordshire has "super-users" on each division, available to offer advice on how to use the hardware. They also do "positive intervention" - identifying and targeting individual refuseniks to try and encourage them to take-up the technology. "But it's a question of winning hearts and minds rather than waving a big stick and trying to make people do it because I've found that that doesn't work," added Hitch. "It's one of those things that really needs a lot of effort."

But a smartphone is not the only...

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