PC Power

Apparently Gordon Brown is pissing away more taxpayers money with the energy that The Earl of Bamford spent the family fortune on maintaining the Calili cartel in business. The Curiously titled National Policing Improvement Agency say so anyway. 10,000 hand held computers for £50mn - certainly didn't fall off the back of a lorry.

Apparently emboldened by HM Inspector of Constabulary the dumb Ronnie Flanagan some time Chief Constable of Ulster whose staff, lied in court, supplied, money, arms, explosives to paid killers and drug dealers and whose officers handing of evidence at the time of the Omagh bombing was so recently excoriated in court by a judge ......

Emboldend by this dumbfuck, over £50Mn is being spent on providing PC's with PC's which Gordon had mentioned at last year's Labour Party Conference (see Spy Blog).

Richard Earland, Chief Information Officer at the NPIA said,

"Officers who have access to databases, such as the Police National Computer, command and control and intelligence systems while out on patrol, will spend less time returning to the station and more time on the frontline - therefore increasing visibility and reassuring the public. This builds on previous work carried out on a small scale and will streamline access to information at the point of operational decision making."

Ho.Ho.Ho.

Operational Details are scarce but there must evidently be two uses for remote computer terminals / PDA's / Data capture terminals.

1. Access to online databases.

Access to the Police National Computer, DVLC , etc is and has been available for years / decdes by contacting local Police HQ and requesting the information using radio / mobile phone. This ensures that data access is secure , although of course such access has been widely abused for years. Lord Patel has through the use of ex policemen who have become private dicks obtained information for payment ... as evidently does the Press, crooks Unlce Tom Cobbleigh and All. This is not limited to Home Office employees Lord Patel was provided regularly by VAT staff with competitor's VAT payment / Turnover information.

To provide remote access leaves the terminals open to theft, makes access codes more insecure... a friend of Toni Fabuloso , a Police lady was stopped recently by a Lancashire Police car in Burnley, equipped with PC access to the DVLC. It was evident that they were not trained / incapable of using the equipment and were shown by Toni's friend, in front of whom they discussed access codes. It eventually dawned on them that they were in the presence of a Police officer who regularly used the PNC daily for their job.

The Police lady had been stopped because the system showed that she had no insurance for her car. Such are the benefits of providing Plod in his Panda with access to the PNC.

There is no argument whatever for extending access to the nation's secure databases from remote mobile locations. Plod can continue to call in now, as he has done for many years.

2. Data collection

Lord Patel spent over 20 years developing shop floor data collection in manufacturing - which essentially is no different to Plod collecting data for , say, stops under the terrorism Act Section 40. Such a task is deceptively simple ..ask Mr Mc Nulty the Home Office Minister.

A little history is due here. First systems, used in house wall mounted untis with a hard wired serial RS232 interface - Source terminals made by two graduates from Birmingham. Built like brick built outhouse, dust proofed, waterproof, membrane keyboard with programmable keys, 20 inputs and outputs, 2 line 14 character LCD display. Brilliant bit of kit.

Then the first mobile data collector was the original Psion unit, this was soon discarded because they couldn't get an RS232 interface to work quickly enough.

After that the Oyster (same folks who brought you the Oyster card) hand held with a 4 line 32 character LCD screen, tiny QWERTY keyboard and inputs for bar code reader wand. Ruggedised and bright yellow so it was (supposedly difficult to lose / mislay). This came with a cut down basic and it's own MDSOS variant operating system.

Then when Compaq produced the first wireless PDA's , superseded by a never ending series of Hewlett Packard products it became almost impossible to maintain development as operating system improvements , memory capacity, Wi-Fi speeds increased along with security, and other data capture features became available.

If the idea of speeding up Plod's paper work by 99 minutes a day is possible, it will require a massive effort and whoever does it can benefit from many, many , man years, a lot of dosh and patient customers.

1. Battery life is critical. Consideration of this is fundamental to choice of equipment.
2. The elements collected must be minimised.
3. Data entry must wherever possible be automated - eg use of 2D or 3 D barcodes , automatic character recognition etc.,
4. Text entry from a keyboard must be eliminated. In bad light, or with sunshine, pissing rain, wind and maybe wearing gloves nobody can accurately use a hand held device for entering free text - especially when dealing with a crime suspect.
5. The forms Plod fills in were never designed for such procedures and will require standardising and streamlining - which will never happen.
6. Experience shows that the overhead of error checking in data entry routines is always understated (and misunderstood) - for example if a simple Y/N response is required to a question, the chances of hitting M instead of N are about 50%.

If you can imagine the chances of getting these simple design principles across to 44 Police forces, plus other bodies involved , the design / IT teams involved ... and arriving at a single agreed method of remote, mobile data capture ..

However the experience, wisdom and knowledge of Lord Patel is available to make the job easier.

Meanwhile Plod will piss away Gordon's and the taxpayer's money. See more at Spy Blog Police Receive £50 Million For 10,000 Hand Held Computers i.e. £5,000 each - are they gold plated ?