#digitalsurrey: Surrey Police Mobile Phone App \ Superintendent Stephens & Angus Fox
Chief Superintendent Gavin Stephens from the Surrey Police Force and mobile app developer Angus Fox spoke to Digital Surrey attendees on Wednesday 25 January, explaining the thinking behind a recently launched mobile app for police officers and members of the public alike. One to help combat crime in Surrey.
The idea for the app is simple. Give police officers a mobile device which connects up to a police database which is updated both by them and by members of the public. The app is currently made available for police officers on Android. Members of the public can download it for the iPhone. There have been 6000 downloads thus far (according to Angus Fox make it a far more popular communication tool than Twitter when compared to Surrey police force followers). Future plans include rolling out the app to a variety of different plans.
Chief Superintendent Stephens outlined the overarching goals for the app, including the need to make access to police easier for members of the public, help the community influence police work, help make police ‘interventions’ swifter and help people give feedback on police action.
A mobile product sold to public and police officers with a snappy tagline – ‘Policing in Your Pocket’.
This isn’t a gimmick. The advantages are obvious. With the framework for the application established, the software built and back-end systems in place, the app’s first few months (or years?) in existence will be about introducing the advantages this kind of policing based on multiple sources and multiple types of crime-related information both to police forces up and down the country as well as the community at large. An app which harnesses the advantages of social media networks with all the multimedia sharing such networks support and packaging it up in a handy, easily accessible app for non-social media types to use.
In that respect, the app isn’t revolutionary. Indeed, the way in which Stephens spoke about how this development helps the Surrey police force made it sound more like an extension of developing and defending police reputation online. “Nipping a problem in the bud is far cheaper than an intervention,” said Stephens at the end of the evening.
Against this background, the app was an upgrade to the “email your local community police officer” entry point advertised on the Surrey Police website. Technically and editorially, the force was striving to do what most other organisations with a wide customer base, with lots to gain and painfully humiliating losses to suffer do to get ahead of the game.
Think how big brands use social media to promote themselves online via social media and then think of the challenges you’d face doing that in an organisation like the police.
So whilst I spent most of the evening not regarding the technical challenges inherent in building an app like this as nothing short of achievable, it was the getting the buy-in to the project in the first place which was the more impressive and – with no offence to app developer Angus Fox – noteworthy.
How do you sell the introduction of a new tool (both the app and the idea of the community contributing to your real-time knowledge base) to a large, sprawling public sector organisation liable to fragmented, disconnected project work (or worse, ‘turf wars’) with none of the competitive streak of the financial sector, no budget, vested interests and an ongoing distrust of new technology?
Given some of the perhaps not so unsurprising anecdotes Fox shared about how he found it difficult to get buy-in from other police forces (one even included being warned off the project due to ‘tendering rules’), his subsequent success can be pinpointed to one critical factor: connecting with an engaged, forward-thinking individual in a position of reasonable influence who can seed his influence across a top-down organisation who weren’t saying ‘no’, but instead “what can you do for us and how much for?”
Work on the app began in December 2010 and was finished in March 2011. It was trialled in an area of Surrey with around 100,000 members of the population. There were 6000 downloads of the public facing app.
The potential seems huge. It might also seem huge because it’s the story of a relatively commonplace technical solution into a traditionally conservative part of our life experience. Imaginations began to run away just a bit.
Would it be possible for example for someone to ring 999 via the app and send photos as well as geo-location data, so aiding the police in dealing with a crime being committed and being reported on? And what were the implications for the user and for the police?
Increased community involvement in policing was an obvious advantage along with the knock-on effects of an increase in public confidence and the emergence of local ‘advocates’. All very good things for public sector organisations.
But on the flip-side is the potential for the police having to change their skillset. With an influx in different types of evidence coming their way – community members effectively being the police’s ears and eyes and sending the ‘raw evidence’ in direct – don’t the police have to adopt ever increasingly rigorous techniques to corroborate evidence before taking action? Far from helping make combatting crime a swifter action, will there be more steps involved in checking authenticity before action can be taken?
Stephens response to the question threw light on the way in which he and Fox probably sold the idea to Surrey Police force and what other public sector organisations will need to help integrate themselves with current now mainstream technological trends.
“The next UK atrocity is going to see evidence posted on social media first,” he warned. “We need to prepare for that. And in the meantime, we need to practise on something manageable first.”
Digital Surrey was introduced by Abigail Harrison, supported by James Firth and Open Digital and hosted by the University of Surrey. The next event is scheduled for Thursday 23 February 2012.
