All about real time social Engagement - Surrey Police Open Day

Surrey Police Headquarters - Sunday 19th June 2011 - We spent the day at Surrey Police open day.

The weather was good and all aspects of policing in Surrey were on display from the expertise of the dogs and their handlers to the vehicles specialist equipment and firearms that the officers and staff use, and of course also technology of all kinds from Automatic Number Plate recognition camera vans to BlackBerry enabled fingerprint machines. We were invited to be part of the Runnymede display which highlighted the work of the Safer Runnymede partnership between Surrey Police and the local authority, Runnymede Borough Council. Our focus of course was on our mobile app for online real-time social engagement by the Runnymede Safer Neighbourhood Team using mobile phones to update the Twitter account @runnymedebeat in real-time, as officers go about their activities.

During the day we were very busy at times showing the app to officers of all ranks up to and including Chief!, as well as police authority members and members of the public. We explained how it connects the local police with their communities - online. Commuters, visitors, people at home all use online applications these days and the app reaches out to them telling them who their local officers are and what they are doing. We had two officers from the Runnymede team, who use the app on their mobile phones as part of their normal working day, as well as the borough commander Roger Nield. They all tweet out on the RunnymedeBeat Twitter account identified by their initials and badge number. I was there with Jim Smith OBE (on the right with PC Anita Clark) and all of us were able to showcase the app and its capabilities and despite a poor phone signal it performed well placing the tweets we sent right in the field at Mount Browne.

I often sit quietly in the corner at Runnymede updating phones or discussing with the team possible enhancements to the software, and the workflow around it. I had the opportunity to explain to Mark Rowley, Chief Constable of Surrey Police, that if he could sit unnoticed in Runnymede as I do and take in the atmosphere (which of course would be difficult for him to do), that he would observe as I have done that there has indeed been a culture shift in the Runnymede Team. Officers no longer see social media, and Twitter in particular, as an unknown. They have embraced it, and they now use it to help them go about their work. Our app is the start of that journey to be sure, and I can see how we can extend it and enhance it much further over time, but remember the start point - we had to prove that it was even feasible to do this. It is, and we have.

Neighbourhood Policing - online in real-time

Here is a small example from this morning:

The first tweet of the day for officer ^SB in Virginia Water was:

^SB Looking for speeding motorists in Virginia Water #id13040 #rbar #police Mon Jun 20 06:43:28 via SurreyPoliceApp

This is a pretty effective direct engagement with the online public on a neighbourhood priority issue. It is geocoded which means you can use online maps like Google Maps to see where the officer is. You can do this using the internet or our free app.

Then the second tweet of the day for officer ^SB in Virginia Water was:

^SB Issuing a Fixed Penalty notice in Virginia Water #id13040 #rbad #police Mon Jun 20 07:33:14 via SurreyPoliceApp

Looking at the tweet on the Internet, or in our app, you can see that this officer is showing the public the outcome of the neighbourhood issue. These two real time updates are available to anyone who downloads our free app or looks on twitter. They deliver on the neighbourhood policing model of Access to the community, Influence and Intervention on neighbourhood priorities, and crucially, provide answers to the question 'What did you do about it?'

Interest from the public, officers and members of the police authority

These were the kinds of things we showed people at the open day. Almost everyone we spoke to wanted to see the app in their borough or district. Members of the Police Authority congratulated us on the initiative and what we had achieved - on a shoestring budget and wanted to know when it would be available in their boroughs and districts in Surrey.

Members of the public were even more vocal.

'We need this app in Ash now'

one said, and

'When can we have this in Guildford?'

from another. There were so many of these comments during the day! The public 'get' the app right away. Its not a toy and not a fad. Mobile apps connecting people to live information on the Internet have become a normal part of peoples lives, they use them to check train times, weather, news, and social gossip all the time, and using our app, we explained, you don't have to know anything about twitter or social networks. Users of Twitter of course don't need our app to see the updates and reply to them from there on their web browser, or twitter app of their own choice on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone.

The only signs of difficulty ahead are purely practical logistical ones in that handset procurement and related budgets are long term strategic projects for an organisation like Surrey Police, and yet this is a real time project that requires a different approach. I am very grateful to Vodafone for lending me the phones for Runnymede, but that obviously can't work for a wider roll-out. Neither can Multizone continue without revenue for continued development and roll-out as we take this from a demonstrator to a fully hardened product.

We will be following up this week with Surrey Police operational management, communications management, and IT management. Once our app goes out to the public on the Apple App Store, and the Google Marketplace, the genie will be out of the bottle. I can't wait - but I know that we have to reach a certain bar in order to release the app. Do follow us here and on Twitter for the next few weeks seeing if we succeed or fail. I am betting that we will succeed. We are working hard to make that bet a certainty.

Angus

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