Mapping resources

South Wales Police officers and vehicles in Bridgend and the Vale of Glamorgan are being equipped with the latest GPS mapping technology designed to improve operational performance while making real quantifiable savings.

South Wales Police is equipping police vehicles and officers’ handsets in its Central Division with a special GPS mapping unit that will flag up all resources on a live visual display at the force control centre.

The resource and demand management tool iR3 will ensure the force has the right people in the right place, at the right time, by linking demand and intelligence directly with the resources on the ground at any given moment.

This directly improves response times with the system identifying the closest available resource to any incident. It will also flag-up intelligence markers to a patrolling officer, enabling them to identify things like anti-social behaviour hotspots and vulnerable residences, so they can increase their effectiveness in the community.

Chief Inspector Stephen Jones explained: “The system will prove extremely valuable and I have no doubt that it will improve the service we provide.

“The system has been successfully piloted in South Wales Police’s Northern Division, which means that any initial teething issues have been ironed out before we go live here in Central Division.

“We can now evidence how much time an officer has spent patrolling any given area to a second, so police actions in response to priorities raised through PACT meetings, can now be presented as assurances to the public that steps are being taken to tackle what matters most to them.”

iR3 was developed by L & A Consultants from a 2006 pilot project in Leicestershire which demonstrated operational benefits and cashable savings well above expectation.

It is made up of a framework of workflow and reporting tools that can be tailored for each police force.

iR3 integrates data from command and control, call handling, crime systems, neighbourhood policing, National Intelligence Model (NIM), confidence data, duty management, fleet management and other force systems and offers reporting in near real-time.

The workflow software supports understanding demand, briefing operational officers and reporting performance.

iR3 provides performance measures on incident response, diary incident response, neighbourhood policing, NIM and other tasking. This enables managers to understand the effect on overall performance their decision-making processes has on limited resources.