G4S has awarded Motorola a 10-year contract to deliver the UK’s first cloud-based, integrated “Control Room Solution” (CRS) to Lincolnshire Police.
The CRS is based hosted in Azure Private Cloud.
The company describes the system as a modular control room platform that manages all communications and provides the operator with “situational awareness through a unified voice, messaging and tracking solution.”
“The unified approach, enabled via a set of simple application programming interfaces (API), supports the integration of multiple systems such as CAD, voice logging, social media channels and telephony with Airwave and ESN service”.
Credit: Jaanus Jagomagi
Motorola Police Contract Follows ESN Agreement
The contract comes after the Home Office inked an agreement with Motorola, the main supplier of the new Emergency Services Network (ESN), to deploy the ESN service in a phased approach beginning in January 2019.
That contract looks set to provide a springboard for Motorola to roll out further solutions for those using the ESN.
See also: Home Office Plans New Approach to Emergency Service Network Roll-out
The phased roll-out follows a controversial review of the programme to replace the terrestrial trunked radio (Tetra) network currently used by the UK’s emergency services with services running over EE’s 4G mobile network.
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As Motorola’s promotional literature notes: “The migration to the Emergency Services Network (ESN) changes the landscape for ICCS [Integrated Communications Control Systems].”
“To access ESN functionality, existing ICCS solutions will need to be upgraded and certified. Adding to the complexity is the need to maintain Airwave connectivity during the transition and the associated change management required to enable a smooth control room upgrade.”
The company said in a release: “As the first cloud-based system of its kind used by a UK Police force, CommandCentral CRS will also significantly simplify management for Lincolnshire Police’s IT team.”
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“For example, the ‘as-a-service’ scalability and flexibility benefits of cloud mean it is no longer necessary to pre-determine how many fixed positions or data capacity is required. Additionally, there is no need for a dedicated backup in the case of a site failure.”
“It has been a high priority for me to ensure frontline officers can be deployed quickly, with the right equipment, and to spend as much time as possible in the field reassuring communities, preventing and fighting crime,” Marc Jones, Police and Crime Commissioner for Lincolnshire Police, said in a release.
The release came as in other police tech news Coeus Software Ltd., today released the latest version of its PoliceBox app, dubbed Amicite. The tool minimises voice traffic to and from Command & Control Centres by sending non-urgent requests in digital form through the PoliceBox app.
Coeus said in a release: “In most Police forces today, tasks are allocated to officers via the force’s Command & Control system, irrespective of whether they are urgent or routine. The allocation of the task and sending all of the corresponding information must be dictated over the radio in a 1:1 communication. This needlessly ties up resources and risks errors from miscommunication (incorrect address, misheard name etc.).”
“Relying on voice communication ultimately makes the efficient management of police resources a challenge during the best of times, but this is compounded significantly during a major incident where quick communication between officers and other emergency services can mean the difference between a catastrophic outcome or not. In these scenarios the control room can quickly become overloaded with voice traffic, resulting in incidents not being responded to as effectively or as quickly as they could be.”
PoliceBox minimises voice traffic to and from the Command & Control Centre by sending non-urgent requests in digital form through the PoliceBox app, along with all the relevant accompanying information such as names, addresses, crime number etc. With the latest edition of PoliceBox, tasks can now be sent directly to officers via Push notifications on their smartphone, immediately alerting the officer to a new task. The officer can review the attached information and choose to accept it or not. Where the task is rejected, it is returned to Command & Control to be reallocated to another officer. During a major incident, alerts and information can also be pushed to every officer on shift simultaneously, ensuring officers are fully informed during fast-moving events.
