The trial, which was performed by Surrey and Sussex Police allowed officers access to driver's license images at the roadside, helping them quickly identify whom officers had stopped for traffic offences such as uninsured vehicles or speeding violations. the trial reduced the time taken to identify a driver, once stopped, from 16 minutes to just five minutes, through the images supplied from the license database. More than 1,400 images were accessed during the 12 week trial (that began in mid-August). It which is now expanding to more officers throughout the Force.
According to Ian Williams, senior consultant, Motorola Solutions (former chief inspector and digital policing lead at West Yorkshire Police), this capability “will be rolled out more widely in the near future”.
Sgt. Dan Pascoe at Surrey and Sussex Roads Policing Unit said: "The ability to securely receive Driver and Vehicle License Agency [DVLA] images through Pronto enables frontline officers to quickly confirm the identity of a driver, speed up stop checks and deal with drivers in a more professional and expeditious manner."
”What we’ve found with other [similar] systems is that when the people who regularly come into contact with police… know you have that sort of technology they stop lying to you, they suddenly ‘remember’ who they are. That’s really important because it saves [officers] so much time…,” added Williams.
Currently, there are a number of manual steps for officers to complete when using a body-worn video solution, including booking out the camera and associating it with them at the start of their shift, remembering to switch it on as well as uploading and tagging the footage into a data management system.
“The integration that we’ve done between [BWV, Pronto and CommandCentral Vault] solves all of those problems because now an officer can book out their camera simply by their warrant card…, you can select the best camera for them, the one that’s most charged, the best one to take, it will put all their details onto the system so it correlates who they are and who they’re working with,” said Williams.
“Because of the GPS technology with the cameras, we’re able to correlate the location of that officer [to where] they took [the] footage [they shot during an incident they’ve dealt with] [with] information that’s already in Pronto [regarding the same incident]… so the officer is simply represented with ‘you dealt with this, is this evidential, is this non-evidential?’.”
He added that there’s human oversight at the end of the process “ to check that it’s all correct but what we’ve done is hugely cut down on all those manual processes that [BWV users are] currently going through and it just makes it a lot more efficient for them to get onto the next job in the knowledge that whatever they’ve collected won’t be lost in the system and somebody will be able to go, search for it and find it.”
