Improving policing with business intelligence and data analytics

The challenge

Part of the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada, Halton Regional Police Service (HRPS) ensures the safety of more than 500,000 citizens across 1,000 square kilometers in one of Canada’s fastest-growing regional municipalities. While Halton has been named Canada’s Safest Regional Municipality, HRPS continually researches technology solutions to help it improve service delivery and operational efficiencies.

Wanting a better way to connect its field officers with incident response data, HRPS required a mobile application that would push information from its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system to smartphones and tablets. The agency needed a solution that would allow officers to collect, share and access task-specific policing data in real time.

The solution

HRPS selected Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division to help it deploy a mobile dispatch and response application on smartphones and tablets.

Powered by Hexagon’s easy-to-use mobile application, HRPS can now seamlessly connect field officers to CAD data and task-specific information. With the solution, officers are no longer tethered to patrol vehicles to communicate with dispatchers, access records data or feed relevant policing information back into Halton’s command center. Being able to perform these tasks on the go with a smart device has reduced communication and data retrieval times between the agency’s officers and dispatchers, improving field operations and workflow efficiencies.

For Halton’s officers, the technology provides a greater sense of safety because it allows them to update dispatchers with their location by typing it into the system or by using GPS tracking. With this capability, dispatchers know where officers are located in the event more officers need to respond to an incident or if other public safety services need to be dispatched for assistance.