EFFICIENT ENFORCEMENT

Cheshire Constabulary issues around 12,000 tickets for speeding and other traffic offences each year. When their officers issued reports in the field, it used to be a time-consuming paper process. Emma Mathia is the force’s IT Development Manager:

“Our officers are used to working on mobile devices, but the traffic offence process was still largely manual. Issuing reports in the field involved handwriting for the officer then also photocopying, scanning, double-keying and paper storage in our Central Ticket Office. We knew we could do it more efficiently.”

Cheshire chose our Mobile solution, MTOR, for traffic offence reports so they could automate the connection to the national PentiP system and cut out manual work. Their business case showed that it could use a mobile electronic process and cut out the time consuming manual double keying and achieve efficiencies as well as other associated benefits.

GOING MOBILE

To check that they could realise the benefits and keep it easy for officers, Cheshire trialled the system first. They tested it with one motorway officer, then five more, before rolling it out to over 2000 officers in April 2022.

Emma explains the approach:

“I went out on a shift with our Roads and Crime team so I could see it in action. We then worked with NEC to make it even better, like adding a ‘cut and paste’ function so officers could transfer the details to their notebook with a few taps.”

The solution is designed to be user-friendly, so Emma prepared a few slides for training and then rolled out the link to their mobile devices.

PROVEN RESULTS

Since going live, the force has already seen an increase in both efficiency and data quality with a reduction in inaccurate tickets being processed. The average time taken for a conditional offer to be sent to a member of the public has reduced from 12 days to 10 hours and an average £50 a week in paper ticket costs being saved.

Police officers have found it easy to use too.

“The MTOR app has completely transformed the way I create and submit traffic tickets, it is quicker, more professional and easier to deal with roadside offences at the roadside.”

PC Matt Turner, Cheshire Constabulary