West Yorkshire Police in control for Tour de France
West Yorkshire Police made full use of its command and control system to ensure safety during the Tour de France.
West Yorkshire Police made full use of its command and control system to ensure safety during the Tour de France.
It is only the fourth time the Tour has crossed the English Channel and the first time Yorkshire had hosted Le Grand Départ, which attracted an estimated worldwide television audience of more than three billion last weekend.
Around five million cycling fans also lined the route during the UK leg of the race, which ended in London on Monday (July 7), presenting a unique challenge to the emergency services. Police officers and vehicles needed to be deployed with maximum efficiency to ensure incidents were quickly dealt with and that two-way communication with the control room shaped effective resource deployment.
The SteriaSTORM command and control solution enabled emergency control room operators to deploy officers to an incident as quickly and effectively as possible and then arm them with the information they needed to deal with it effectively when they got there.
Combined with a geographic information system (GIS), it allowed real-time information about the location of police vehicles or officers on detailed maps of the area. This enabled control room operators to make rapid decisions and deploy resources where they were required for Le Grand Départ as it made its way through the West Yorkshire region and into South and North Yorkshire.
West Yorkshire Police was able to track the progress of the race, from the front-runners to the back-markers, to know when it was safe to re-open roads, for example, or to assess the risk of an incident spilling out onto the race route at a critical moment.
It also ensured forces in West, South and North Yorkshire collaborated effectively, as well as ensuring that they did not double-up on manpower that may have been needed for routine police business.