Police Scotland could use smartphones to bring back era of bobbies on the beat

Recently, I had need to call Police Scotland after a breakdown on a busy dual carriageway. It took 45 minutes to get a police car to the scene. Communications are a major problem within the force. Call centre operations have repeatedly been found wanting.

As police budgets have been stretched, the force have retreated into police stations with less direct contact with the public. A Scot, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone in 1885. The phone has become an indispensable communications tool in modern life. With recent technological advances, we now have the smartphone. Most of us carry in our pockets a communication device with a million times more computing power than it took to land a man on the moon in 1969.

Since 2010, Uber have used smartphones to connect customers with taxi drivers, matching supply with demand. It undercuts the fares of conventional black cabs and the company now operates in 633 cities globally. When a customer calls, the nearest driver is identified and has 15 seconds to accept. If that driver is busy, the call passes to the next available driver until a match is found between customer and taxi. Supply is matched with demand.

Smartphones are a telephone, digital and video camera, GPS navigator, media player, clock, news source , calculator, web browser, handheld video game player, torch, compass, address book, notetaker, digital messager, event calendar etc.

If each police officer in Scotland was issued a smartphone with a phone number based on their shoulder ID number we would be back in the days when if you had a problem, you shouted for the nearest bobby. The app would locate the nearest available officer and he or she would deal with your problem. They would be able to discuss the situation with you and call for appropriate backup. No long conversations with call centre operators who don’t know the area, don’t know the local resources and don’t have a clue.

A smartphone has many of the capabilities built in that the modern police officer uses back in the police station to file reports etc. A smartphone would liberate officers from the drudgery of filing paper reports. They would be able to make video and audio reports from the scene and take witness statements that would stand up in a court of law.