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Norfolk Police Officers To Be Tagged To Improve Response Times
Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will be attached to individual police radios to allow controllers to monitor the position of every frontline officer. Combined with equipment that can pinpoint the locations of 999 callers, the system will allow the force to home in on "shouts" to within yards. The system also lets operators filter a map showing the location of its vehicles and constables to reveal only those with the skills needed for a specific incident, like the closest officer with silver bullets during a werewolf attack.
There wolf... There castle
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
...assuming the officer can turn them off when he's indisposed, or off-duty.
But, yeah. Anything that speeds up police response is nice.
The only thing I can wonder though is, Why haven't they done this before? Also great for if you've got an officer down. Unless they take his radio that is...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
of what one of their patrol units looks like was nauseating but on second thought it's design looks quite functional. That's all I got.
like the closest officer with silver bullets during a werewolf attack.
Silver bullets don't actually hurt werewolves. The only way we'll defeat them is by eliminating their source of power - the moon!
Hopefully this will bring some accountability. They can conceivable track the speed of police vehicles to make sure they are obeying traffic laws when not responding to an emergency. It can also be used to verify that an officer was where they were when they said they were there. Of course, this would only be affective if their friends back at the station weren't the ones monitoring.
That the tracking system is turn based and isometric.
I think that frequent tazing would improve their response times faster, and more consistently. Slow cop! No donuDSXZTTT! Perhaps shock collars. That would be nice.
There might be some trouble getting the union to go along.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm starting a pool on how soon devices that show you the nearest cops will be sold on eBay.
Who needs radar detectors if you have a live map with all cops clearly marked??
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
They already tried the system in Australia, but it failed because most people didn't want to dial 666 even if their life depended on it.
Hopefully also useful for letting people know who was clobbering them.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
--
Yeah, I know it's a cliche. Actually, our local cops are at the diner, not the donut shop. But diners are a regional thing. Donut shops are pretty much worldwide.
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
...'til it's used to check whether the police is actually doing their job instead of sitting in the donut shops (or whatever equivalent the police wastes time in the UK)?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This sounds like a job for Team America World Police
Um, this is not really new. Most decent size police depts here in the US have GPS in the cars. Putting it in the radios is a good next-logical-step though. Sounds like a couple of new ideas, like the werewolf-silver-bullet idea. Cool, but it's not really anything revolutionary.
*grumbles* What did we do to deserve this? --Techwolf
is coming .....
(ducks for cover...)
This technology would destroy the plots of old TV shows like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_54_where_are_you. Hollywood would condemn it.
But we're all too young to have ever seen that TV show . . . aren't we?
On the other hand Hollywood celebrities might like the technology if someone could build scanners that spot police cars. If you read http://www.tmz.com/, you would know that those wacky celebrities always manage to bump into a cop while buying drugs, soliciting teenage whores, beating their spouses, etc.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Using the metric of 'how fast police get somewhere' to determine the quality of their service is asking for trouble. In fact, its asking for police to do shit like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tyne/7987832.stm
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm a serving Metropolitan (London) police officer and I think this is a great idea.
We've had tracking on our vehicles for a while now. It gives our supervisors/control room an accurate (as in, technology from 10 years ago accurate) image of our position. Apart from increasing efficiency when allocating calls based on distance and travel time, it's main use is for officer safety. If I push the little red button on my airwaves radio and, for whatever ever reason, I am unable to speak, the control room can dispatch units to my vehicles location.
Foot chases and 'hail downs' can mean I'm a long distance from my vehicle, or if I'm in a anti police estate and not at the location of my last call officers will have trouble locating me. The individual radio locater will be able to prevent this, and increase my personal safety and the safety of my fellow officers.
Of course, members of the public will only see this as a regulatory tool, because all officers hate their job and spend their time at Crispy Creme scoffing donuts. I don't think I've had a day shift so far when I'm not busting my ass for the full 12 hours; dealing with emotional/violent/mentally unstable people, dealing with legal problems and keeping up with a mountain of written work.
What a non story. The TETRA radios that all emergency services personnel have in the UK all have ARL capabilities. What this REALLY means is that Airwave (the company that runs the TETRA system) is finally allowing this ARL to be emitted. In Norfolk. A rural county with not many TETRA radios in it. Not much control channel contention then.
The REAL news will be when they (officially) switch it on for London. Then we will see whether the TETRA system can cope or not.
BTW, you can't track the ARL as the SDSes that are being used are encrypted (as is the voice traffic).
Upon reading the headline, I thought they were talking about Norfolk, VA cops and smiled, thinking of the lady-cops down there that I'd like to "tag".
Missing_DC (too early to bother remembering the password for slashdot)
These upgrades to the Airwave (Tetra based radio/phone) termnials is clearly well overdue, as detecting the correct location is obviously a problem in this article.
The police response car shown is from the Metropolitan Police (i.e. London, not Norfolk), and the Bedfordshire Police logo is from, er, Bedfordshire (again, not Norfolk!).
On a serious note, the Airwave network which is now in use by all forces has the capability to carry GPS (and other data like this) over the network alongside the voice data, and most of the handheld terminals (radios) have the option to have a GPS module added. Most forces have been saying they will roll them out, but of course won't as it costs money, until other forces get it and put them to shame.
An ex-UK-cop (who quit because I was disgusted with the current UK "terrorism" laws and other laws taking away our rights, and the way we as police were being asked to implement them).
That's not very scalable. :)
Living in Norwich, I found it extremely amusing that the only Doughnut shop listed from the above search on googlemaps,is in, wait for it,Wymondham! For those not in the know, the Norfolk Constabulary HQ is in, yep, you guessed it - Wymondham!! http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=DoughnutORdonutshopinNorwich http://www.norfolk.police.uk/article.cfm?artID=6439&catID=729&bctrail=0
I am not sure exactly how the hell a police officer with reflective lettings driving a white with red and yellow (reflective again) markings and more bells and whistes then a carnival ride is supposed to be secret.
Criminals aint' all that high tech. If criminals were smart, they wouldn't be criminals. Oh and if some criminals do come to rely on tracking patrols then they will be easy marks for arrest teams. nobody says that ALL cops will wear trackers. Patrol cops are a deterrent, if a criminals spots one and does not commit a crime because of it then the job is done. The best cop deters crime, not solve them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The fictional Australian police TV series "Rush" depicts technology like this, but takes it one step further: the officers wear video cameras on their tactical vests as well. Back at their headquarters the unit has an 'intelligence officer' (rather than a dispatcher) who monitors each vehicle and officer in real time, and provides support by coordinating responses and running inquiries on the various LE databases and the Internet.
One big problem faced around the world is actually identifying where something is. Addresses postcodes / zipcodes are not perfect they are quirky and arbitrary and worst of all usually require some form of license to use. Knowing the GPS Latitude and Longitude you can pinpoint anywhere on the planet. but they are hard to remember, if you know them at all.
There are some systems available that can solve this some are patented or otherwise closed to free use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash is an open system which encodes a latitude and longitude to a base 32 number (which is just an alphanumeric string). The longer the String the more precise the location is.
An unfortunate drawback is the length of the code is perhaps a little too long to remember easily and be useful.
However a shorter code could be used based on look up tables. kind of similar to http://xkcd.com/426/ you could define an area by the bounding box its contained within. If your within the USA for example you wouldnt need to find the approximate location of the USA since thats already known the bounding area would be defined by a bounding box of the nearest whole degree or a smaller fraction that completely encloses the area of interest. If the USA was still too large an area you could define an area such as california defining the bounding box as the latitudes and longitudes that completely enclose California a Neighboring state would use a similar bounding box which would overlap to a certain extent but it doesnt really matter that a place could be enclosed in two or more bounding boxes since you would use the one defined for your state. probably there is no need to define the bounding box greater than .01 of a degree and generally 0.1 degrees would be close enough.
This would then shorten the code to something most people can remember and keep it free since this concept is derived from the geohash algorithm I would expect it to be free to use by anyone who wishes to use it without payment.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Am I the only one who looked at this article and though of this?
Now we'll always know where Car 54 is.
It has been about 8-9 years since I worked on coding and installing e911 dispatch systems for police and fire, but even then we were using GPS to recommend the closest fire unit of the type (Engine, Quint, Hazmat, etc) needed for the Incident (1 alarm, 2 alarm, etc) to automagically recommend to the dispatcher units to dispatch. It was pretty slick stuff, though a pain to calculate the distance between unit and incident location for each unit and that was using 'as a crow flies' reckoning. I'm sure newer technology is using mapping technology to figure out closest distance based on actual road travel. This jump in the technology is just an extension of what is already out there.
Life is turning out to be more like GTA every day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill a hooker.
So about time. I heard numerous times how cops purposefully respond slowly to incidents to avoid work...
In Portugal all cars will be tagged... :(
http://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/normal_for_norfolk.htm
That hent got no front wheels, that hent.
Most modern police walkie-talkies have gps in them now. All they have to do is activate it or get motorola to upgrade their units with a module. I'm actually working on an emergency operations console for our GIS and we can attach the AVL (vehicle GPS) to our radio system and see where everyone is. Pretty cool. Cool so long as they don't start tagging citizens with it.
I know that Greensboro, North Carolina and other police/public safety departments across the United States already use something like this. It may not be setup to filter down to specific officer skills but I am sure they could implement that (skills such as spanish speaking, woman officer for email body searches, etc). The system they use here is from the old OSSI USA, now SunGard Public Sector, software suite which includes a CAD. In this case, CAD is computer aided dispatch.