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On Patrol: part 1
Published: January 2006, The BAPCO Journal
Officer Millichip is making his regular vehicle patrol around the center of Birmingham,a visual presence and reassurance of the maintenance of law and order.He is stationary, observing the regular flow of delivery vehicles and services and the bunching and weaving of pedestrians as they flow along in front of his view.
Jose Patel,at her desk in the West Midlands control room,can see that Millichip is one 7 officers who are not committed to specific tasks and incidents at the moment. From the console she can monitor the status of every available asset,traffic flows, the movements of dangerous and valuable cargoes, the public transport network, the information and communications systems that support the emergency services, the network of monitoring network of surveillance cameras, alarms, detection systems and get a wider view of public order alerts and activity beyond the region since the Luton incident. An alarm trigger in the Birmingham shopping center looks isolated and triggers no major incident intervention.The command system suggests this is one for Millichip and with a brief verbal command confirms. Jose moves her attention to an alert near to Stratford and the computer transfers control of the town center incident over the radio link to Millichip.
His information system alerts him to a potential incident within his general area of responsibility,he sets down his coffee cup in the place holder, acknowledges the alert and requests available detail.
The windows of his vehicle darken to reduce the glare of the sunshine and a series of time lapse images of the shop frontage and the calculated plan view tracking movements is projected quickly onto his dashboard display area.
The automatic system informs him that the alert came from a breakage of window glass at a jewelery store,a potential smash and grab and theft of goods. He makes an immediate assessment of the situation and safety and security issues and decides to move to the location. His cockpit system gives him a recommended route, which takes into account that current traffic flow, the temporary closure of one street following the water main problem earlier in the day and as no great urgency is indicated no traffic flow management changes or alerts are generated.The vehicle surges silently forward with the thrust of its electric motors smoothly controlled by a touch on the accelerator.He quickly navigates to the location and makes a more detailed situation assessment.
He alerts the store maintainers to the nature of of the damage with the touch of a few keys,before ordering forensic data collection to supplement the photographic evidence.The crime record is utomatically generated and emailed to the store operations and maintainers and to their insurers through a chain of information systems and databases.
Attached to the email is a detailed photographic record of the damage and details of the store location which enable the maintainers to rapidly produce a quotation for repair and restitution and to both minimise the time that the store is exposed to the elements and remains unsecured and reduce the time that the maintainer needs to spend on the site with the disruption to traffic and pedestrian flow from an extended security perimeter and parked vans in the street.
Taking care to select his virtual vantage point he reviews the record around the time of the incident and identifies a suspect. In moments the computer identifies that the suspect, having left the scene has reappeared in New Street Station, and alighted onto a train bound for Tipton at platform 7. Surveillance shows that he does not appear to be carrying the package that he had at the time of the theft,it was probably discarded before he entered the Shopping center and descended to the railway below.
With reasonable suspicion, Millichip applies for and is granted authority to track the movements of the suspect back in time to before the incident and to correlate it with other collected information: the location of mobile phone hand sets,the RFID tags that are sewn in to some footwear, bags and apparel. He quickly establishes with the aid of the computer system records of the suspects movements, probable identity and past crime record and the computer automatically produces the outline case file,pending confirmation from forensics and recovery of the discarded evidence that could link the suspect to the crime.
Millichip assesses the immediate risks and decides that arrest is not a high priority, could be disruptive and recommends a low priority interception.The computer confirms that a colleague will make the arrest after confirmation of identity and schedules it in Office Bryant's list of actions for later in the day.
