magicomm

Customer

Dorset Police is the Home Office police force with the responsibility of policing the English county of Dorset. The force has an estabishment of over 2500 staff including police officers, special constables and civilian staff. The force is divided into four Divisions, these being Western Division (covering the Western half of the county), Eastern Division (covering the Eastern part of the county) and a separate division for each Poole and Bournemouth, the two main urban areas of the county police force

Challenge

When a scenes of crime officer attended an incident, they had to complete the paperwork at the site, transport it back to the station and manually enter the data from the form into the police database. This meant that there was a significant delay between the crime and the availability of the data to the rest of the force which created further delays in the investigation of a case. Also the accuracy of the data was not as good as it needed to be.

Solution

magicomm, in partnership with Dorset Police began a pilot for six crime scene investigators whereby the data was entered onto a magicomm form at the crime scene. The investigator then ticked the form and the data was immediately transferred back to HQ. The trial proved that the technology not only reduced the double inputting of scene examination reports, but that the information from crime scenes was made available to an investigator within minutes of the evidence being recovered. This had extensive benefits in major crime investigation where early results/information can prevent many man-hours of investigation work and assist the Senior Investigating Officer direct his lines of enquiry.

Due to the success of the pilot, the system was rolled out to all of the crime scene investigators and the functionality was extended to integrate the data directly into the force computer system using a combination of magicomm's expertise in data integration, the G303 pen and the Mercury routing platform.

Benefits

The benefits achieved by the digtal pen implementation have been extensive. The most obvious of these is the huge time saving that is achieved by the investigators no longer having to manually enter the data when they return to HQ. The fact that the data goes directly from the paper to the back office system in a matter of minutes means that the average time saving per investigator is forty minutes per shift. These time savings lead to a cost reduction which gives a very rapid return on investment.

The data that is sent via Mercury is secured with 256 bit AES encryption which provides the best level of security that is possibly available and exceeds all of the police requirements.

The investigators found the digital pen intuitive and easy to work with and the design of the form and training provided meant that the quality of the hand writing recognition that magicomm's software interprets is extremely accurate. All crime scene documentation for a particular case is now available on-line whereas it was previously stored in paper files. This means that any officer can now instantly call up an image of the crime scene report within seconds rather than having to go and manually extract a paper form as they used to do.

The success of the CSI system has meant that magicomm are now working on further digital pen and paper applications for other areas of the force, further reducing bureaucracy within the work that the police carry out.

For further information contact us.

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