Suffolk Constabulary – Driving through the changes with Automatic Vehicle Location

The national implementation of Airwave and subsequent organisational changes meant that Forces had the opportunity of reviewing many of their standard procedures. Suffolk Constabulary looked into assessing despatch procedures, in particular the possibility of improving response times to emergency calls and increasing the safety of their officers through location technology. The Airwave network was initially deployed for voice. However, Suffolk saw an opportunity to make the most of the digital network and decided to use it for data communications as well.

Vehicle location was selected as a useful additional tool for the force, helping not only identify the most appropriate officer near an incident, but also to know at all times where officers were.

In order to achieve maximum benefit from the tracking capabilities, the mapping element of the system needed to be integrated to the Computer Aided Despatch (CAD) system from Intergraph, which was already being used by control room operators. This would allow operators to see the exact location of an incident on their screens as well as the location of nearby resources.