27 Police forces get £50m for 10,000 mobile devices

27 June 2008 by Rod McLaren

NPIA’s press release, 25 May 2008: 27 police forces will receive a total of 10,000 handheld computers to help them increase police officer time on the beat. And as reported by the BBC: Police given hand-held computers and the Telegraph: Government is to spend £50 million equipping police forces with hand-held computers to ‘cut paperwork’, despite frontline officers saying they are ineffective.

Successful police forces

Tony McNulty, Minister for Policing, said,

‘We are investing in new technology to make crime fighting more effective and to save officers’ time. This £50 million capital fund will deliver 10,000 mobile data devices to forces. It is just one element of a range of improvements we are delivering to cut unnecessary bureaucracy, exploit new technologies and enable police officers to spend more time on front line policing.’

Police forces which made successful bids were:

• Association of Police Forces in Scotland (Strathclyde, Tayside, Northern, Lothian and Borders, Grampian, Fife, Dumfries and Galloway, Central Scotland) – received £2.5 million
• Bedfordshire
• British Transport Police – almost £2m to fund 800 PDAs and printers
• Cambridgeshire
• Cheshire
• East Midlands collaboration (Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire) – £8.3m for 4,000 devices, training, infrastructure and other costs. BlackBerrys, PDAs and Mobile Data Terminals (MDTs) in cars; of which Northants police to get 700 BlackBerrys
• Essex
• Hertfordshire – £1.9m to add 1,000 PDAs and 300 MDTs
• Kent – £1.9m for 1,100 PDAs and 150 mdts
• Lancashire – £3.36m for 2,200 devices
• Metropolitan Police
• Staffordshire – “£3.7m for 1,200 mobiles, ‘and 300 working with the Central Motorway Police Group [MDTs?] and the region’s counter-terrorism unit’
• Thames Valley – 1,100 BlackBerry 8310 Curves to help increase the time bobbies spend on the beat (and they’d snuck a story round the embargo on 7 May, citing £637k in funding)
• Yorkshire collaboration (Humberside, North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire)

But Durham Constabulary had its application rejected by the Government and Northumbria Police did not apply for the funding. (All of those details are from news stories – we’ll update if we find more publicly.)

Commentary and criticism

The project has had a fair amount of commentary and criticism though.

Does it cost too much per device?
The headline criticism is that £50 million divided by 10,000 devices is £5,000 per device, which is a hell of a lot more than devices actually cost on the street. The story behind these numbers is that the funding is for both one-off set-up costs (the devices, infrastructure, training, procurement costs, etc) plus the operational costs for a multiple-year period (data plans, data management, management overheads, etc). Whilst there’s no doubt that government needs to spend wisely, this isn’t quite as simple a story as it might have seemed of government massively overpaying.

Are the devices secure?
Or ‘what are the risks when the devices get lost or stolen?’ This is typically answered in three ways in mobile data. Firstly, strong user authentication security, which is generally a policy/training matter for IT groups to manage. Secondly, robust remote data and device management allows devices to be wiped of data or rendered completely unusable in the event that a device is lost or compromised. BlackBerry lead in this area. Thirdly, applications only store data locally temporarily, or have their access constrained to information that isn’t protectively marked or Restricted, rather than Confidential. Airwave’s services are good at this latter approach.

NPIA’s recent comment on security briefly mentions all three approaches:

The NPIA has taken a technology-agnostic approach to which networks the devices will run on, prompting some concern from security experts. Some forces will use Airwave ­- the police radio network ­- while others will opt to use commercial networks. The NPIA said that because traffic is encrypted, the network used is irrelevant.

RIM wouldn’t entirely agree that the network is solely where the security concern is. In a news story with Thames Valley Police (in which he also notes that 10% of police officers carry BlackBerrys now), Graham Baker reminds us that BlackBerrys are the only mobile devices to be accredited for use with up to ‘restricted’ level data by CESG.

Is mobile data genuinely effective, reducing paperwork or saving time?
The Government is to spend £50 million equipping police forces with hand-held computers to ‘cut paperwork’, despite frontline officers saying they are ineffective, says the Telegraph. There are two things here. Firstly, there are studies that claim the opposite. The first to hand is the 2007 North Wales Police case study in which a Niche RMS on BlackBerry solution gave an average 58mins increased time out of station and reduced “dead” time per shift for uniformed constable and PCSOs), and projected 1.475m in financial efficiencies for 2007-8 and 2008-9.

But note that uniformed officers and management might not agree on success criteria for a new technology project. A lack of dead time might not always be perceived as a measurable improvement. And that leads to the second point: that it’s perhaps a story of capability expansion rather than time saved: more is done in same time.

There are caveats to this though. Some pilots run alongside existing systems and processes, resulting in officers having to enter data into two, parallel, unconnected systems. It’s not a great way to run a pilot because it proves that the technology works, but not that policing teams are happy to use it (too often it can harden officer resolve against the new system because it, rather than existing systems, appears to represent needless work).

Shouldn’t we spend the money on more frontline officers instead?
(Or as a Kettering resident commented: ‘I don’t think Blackberries are the solution. They need to get more officers and get them on the street.’) The Flanagan report publicly notes that after several years of growth (police officer numbers have grown, particularly in the areas of neighbourhood policing, Community Support) police budgets are now under a lot of pressure, and may fall in real terms. Because of this, the focus will shift towards increasing capability and efficiency of officers, the (sad) truth being that technology is usually cheaper than bodies. The challenge for design and technology vendors is to play their part in making products that enhance police officer capability without distancing them from the communities they serve.

Future funding?

NPIA haven’t yet announced the funding, vendor choices or procurement conditions of their “accelerator programme” for mobile data, but an announcement is expected soon. (The accelerator programme is for police forces who haven’t undertaken significant mobile data pilots yet, and comprises a chunk of the £50m fund.)

Update: NPIA announced in July 2008 that the Accelerator vendors are Airwave and C&W/Beat.

And beyond that, NPIA also hints of more funding to come in future. NPIA’s CIO Richard Earland:

‘We have heard from the minister that there will be a second wave of funding, and it’s very likely that forces will provide some of their own resource, and I’d expect to see most operational staff having these devices at some point in the medium term.’

Update: NPIA’s announcement of £30m additional awarded funding came in December 2008.

This will be dependent upon the success of the first wave of funding: can it deliver positive and sustainable business outcomes? It probably can, though the key challenge in achieving that is probably the aggressive timescale set by the funding.

.

Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave, one of the large vendors of software and telco services to policing. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.

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