WA Police Concept Car
Over the past five years, WA Police has increasingly looked to ICT as a way to work smarter, safer and more productively. With Telstra's Next IP® and Next G® networks providing the connectivity, Police recently launched two key innovations: the Concept Car, which has increased the number of police inquiries from 300 to 10,000 per car per day; and the Forensics Solutions, which enables forensics investigators in the field to examine and match finger print information collected at the scene in minutes rather than days.
Transcript
Superintendent Lance Martin - Program Director Business Technology Delivery - WA Police
Five years ago we had no mobile data capability, Four and a half years ago we started to implement mobile data… two years ago we introduced mobile data using the Telstra Next G network across the state. And about one year ago we were able to implement the concept car that we have today, which introduces a number of leading-edge mobile technologies. Assistant Commissioner Craig Ward - WA Police
It’s extremely important t-to get police officers where they need to be and to allow them to have the tools to do the job. To not have to return to the police station, to have um the technology that allows them to do their business at the fingertips, no matter where they are.
Lance
Well the concept car itself is a collection of a number of technologies that will support quality policing outcomes.
Des Bahr - Chairman, National Safety Agency, CEO of APCO Australia
With the inclusion of of in-car video and broadcasting that video back to the comms centre where officers can make um decisions in real time, the capture of automatic license plate recognition to provide more effective means of scanning the vehicles on the road today um and searching against the database in real time using the Next G® network to ascertain um those vehicles that may be unregistered or the registered owner may be unlicensed or it may be a stolen vehicle, again making our roads safer and ah a-and protecting our community.
Lance
The average vehicle does between 250 or 300 enquiries per day, which whilst is significant is nothing in comparison to the 1,000 or 1,200 per hour that the concept car does.
Greg Italiano - Executive Director, WA Police
The technologies we see in the concept car can be, as most people conceive it, straightforward traffic enforcement. So we scan a number plate and we say that’s a stolen motor vehicle, pull it over, make an enquiry. But it can be far more sophisticated than that if we want to make it that way. We can use it to target arsonists, Targeting and reducing high crime rates by location we can use it to tell us information about who’s moving where, when, in a given place. We can use it to capture a whole lot of information that we might use for other purposes at other times.
Lance
In relation to safety, the concept car brings a number of real benefits. Because of its proximity awareness, when police engage in an incident they’re fully briefed in relation to the type of situation that they’ll be getting into. They’re aware for example that the vehicle that they’re about to pull up has a certain history, that the people associated with that vehicle have a certain type of behaviour, and as a result they can engage that situation in the most appropriate manner.
Craig
Um in terms of the concept car we’re um we know that the amount of information that it generates, the data that’s recorded, it has to be held and dealt with somewhere, so working in partnership with Telstra we’re now able to look at a number of um fairly advanced solutions in how we deal with those matters, and these are things that policing agencies around the world are grappling with, and we need to know that we’ve got a robust methodology to deal with that, so that we can present that in evidence in the future, ah and make sure we’ve got the ability to make decisions on information that the public generally expects us to have. So it is a very important relationship.
Des
The national safety agency has been working with the Western Australia Police for some time now to produce not only ah a safer working environment for their officers, but an integrated solution um with some of the most advance technology available to us today.
Lance
One of the advantages I found dealing with Telstra is that they have a similar cultural model to police, and that is doing the job right and rolling their sleeves up and getting their hands dirty when things need to get pulled across the line. What we’re doing with the concept car would’ve been impossible to contemplate two years ago. Knowing what we can do today and applying that to what we could possibly do tomorrow, tomorrow is a brave new world.
