Surrey Police and Sussex Police Harness Mobile Technology to Increase time Officers spend on the Frontline

Airwave Solutions Limited, a Motorola Solutions company, in partnership with O2 today announce that over 3,000 frontline Surrey Police and Sussex Police officers are now using specialist mobile technology to improve frontline policing and reporting.

The new joint project enables 1,250 officers at Surrey Police and 1,750 at Sussex Police to replace paper-based activities such as vehicle registration checks, speeding tickets, and tests for the influence of drugs or alcohol on drivers with intuitive digital forms on mobile devices. Both forces have seen substantial time and cost saving benefits. On average, officers have saved up to two hours per shift, time that can now be better spent policing the streets and supporting the public. This modernisation of processes has enabled Surrey Police to cut costs by £7 million.

The new extended regional deployment follows a successful six year partnership with Surrey Police that has seen the Pronto e-notebook and suite of software applications deployed to frontline offers across both police forces. Pronto is a complete digital replacement for an officer's paper notebook, operational processes and forms. It provides remote, mobile access to all key policing systems, ensuring officers can capture, reuse and validate information on the frontline while reducing back office bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Before Pronto, a single activity such as writing out a ticket would take back-office staff over four minutes to transfer paper-based notes onto a force’s system – now that process takes seconds as all data captured on devices is synchronised automatically.

As well as productivity benefits, Pronto is enabling greater sharing of information and collaboration between the two forces. Officers can access national police systems and local databases across the two forces, such as the Records Management Systems (Niche) on the move. This allows officers to work together at an incident or crime scene, sharing data and resources in real-time rather than having to return to the station or have back-office staff locate and then upload relevant information.

This new regional deployment brings the total number of forces using Pronto to 16 (33 percent of all forces in the UK).

Discussing the project Gavin Stephens, Deputy Chief Constable at Surrey Police said: “We are seeing the beginnings of a fully digitised Criminal Justice System – from incident to court room. What’s aspirational in digital policing and collaboration between forces in some parts of the country is reality here.”