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Ground-breaking stop & search application
Tetra terminals being used by Greater Manchester Police to record ‘stop and search’ data.
With the recent entry into force of the Crime and Security Act 2010 and the amendment of PACE code A, the national requirement to record ‘stop and account’ was removed, the recording requirement for ‘stop and search’ was simplified and electronic recording was permitted.
In close co-operation with Greater Manchester Police, Sepura and Northgate have together created a solution which allows forces to record ‘stop and search’ data using a radio application on an advanced radio terminal and automatically feed data into an application. This avoids the need for officers to carry multiple pieces of hardware.
This solution offers a number of key benefits:
- Reduced cost of undertaking stop and search, both in terms of paper and manual data entry.
- Frees up time for frontline officers, as the time taken to enter the data directly into a radio is far less than for the paper-based approach.
- Reduced cost and risk of implementation, as the solution requires no additional hardware and is intuitive enough for someone to be trained using e-learning to further reduce cost.
- Better data quality and fuller intelligence picture. By replacing manual input with electronic recording, the solution reduces the scope for error and increases the value of the data that is available as intelligence.
- The solution also promotes best practice by providing checks to ensure that correct procedure has been followed in all cases.
The solution will reduce the cost of dealing with stop & search. Information, including the accurate location of the event, will be collected at scene through a short series of menu selections on the Sepura radio, reducing the occurrence of errors and the time to capture information. An automated process will then collect this information from the radios and pass it to a force’s audit database. Authorised users will be able to view, edit and report on it from a web user interface. The whole process eliminates unnecessary manual input.
Read more about it in the next BAPCO Journal.
