There are many factors driving modernisation in public safety. Chief among them is the proliferation of data. Sensors, alarms, surveillance cameras, and even social media posts are flooding into emergency communications centres, on top of the dizzying volume of regular phone calls.
Large police forces are processing millions of contact records per year, with two-thirds of them coming from direct public contact, and nearly half coming through emergency 999 calls.
What’s more, people just communicate differently these days. Rather than make a call, people want to text, send videos and real-time chat with emergency services. Some even reach out through social media as a first contact.
The legacy computer-aided dispatch systems from 40 years ago - some still action-string/keyboard based with monochrome screens and software based on MS DOS coding - just aren’t equipped to process all that data. After years of piecing together upgrades, employees using this antiquated hodge-podge of systems have dozens of different interfaces with which to contend.
The public sees tagging police in a social media post as more efficient. However, this only creates another step as someone must manually log a crime reported through Facebook, X or TikTok into the old system.
Emergency communications centres are also dealing with an onslaught of real-time data coming in from incident scenes, including Internet of Things devices, drones, and wearable technology.
The increased volume of work is exacerbated by staffing shortages, which has resulted in a heavy recruitment effort for call handlers in the UK.
Automated and efficient
Having all these new avenues of communication and data should be a positive. With more ways to communicate and gather information, responses can be faster and lives can be saved.
But to effectively join the twenty first century and serve a tech-savvy public, police forces must move to modernise and digitalise their command-and-control systems and take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence. The overall aim: streamline systems to make them as simple, automated and effective as possible, to better serve the public and the police force.
Today’s computer-aided dispatch systems are AI-enabled, cloud-ready, and able to provide a single interface to multiple applications. The automated processes available in digital command and control solutions eliminate many of the manual steps formerly required of dispatchers and call takers.
For example, a legacy system used by a major UK police force would require these steps in filing a crime report:
1. 1) A victim fills out a report online.
2. 2) An antiquated ‘robotic’ programme converts the form to transfer into the legacy CAD system.
3. 3) An employee verifies and assesses the information provided by the automated solution.
4. 4) The employee passes the crime report to a records employee.
5. 5) The records employee inputs the crime report into the records system.
6. 6) The records employee contacts the victim with a case number.
7. 7) A victim support employee advises the victim on next steps.
All of this takes three people, three different interfaces and two to three days to process.
A modern contact management application cuts that process from days to seconds. Once the victim files the report, the application processes it into the records system and immediately returns a reference number and next-step instructions to the victim.
Without any form of contact management system in place, an operator must deal with each contact individually, potentially searching multiple systems to find relevant information, getting the caller to continually repeat themselves, often double keying information between systems.
Integrations/interfaces to third-party applications (WhatsApp, Web, email and so on) for contact allow the public to choose their preferred channel of contact. And each contact will be recorded and handled in the same way and effectively.
Assistive AI
In the background of chaotic emergency communications, assistive artificial intelligence can monitor all incoming data for trends and anomalies and provide alerts to busy call takers and dispatchers who might miss certain connections amid the chaos of the daily job.
For example, assistive AI might notice an increase in calls about anti-social behaviour issues in a particular neighborhood over a period of weeks, which could indicate a local problem that might require an additional police presence. Or it might notice a similar vehicle description in connection with variety of reported crimes, helping investigators narrow down a suspect list.
Unlike overburdened dispatchers and investigators, AI can sift through all the data to make sense of it, helping staff to not miss anything amid the chaos.
While there may be too much data for humans to parse through, their expertise, experience, intuition, and oversight are needed to evaluate the alerts provided by AI and determine what information is actionable. Assistive AI is just that, a virtual assistant that can make an otherwise impossible job possible and meet the growing demands of the public.
With the daily increase in data to gather and analyse, automation and assistive AI are the way forward if police forces are to keep up with the capabilities of modern technology and the public’s expectation for digital communication.
All in all, a modern, AI-equipped digital system - integrated with public-facing communications, the emergency communications centre, police incidents and crime records—can improve the efficiency of the entire police force and the quality of community relations and policing.
Nick Chorley is director of EMEA public safety and security for Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division.
