Spot the dangerous criminal: Delivering the right mobile information in stressful situations
Previously, if the Queensland police wanted to know about the person they had stopped or the vehicle they were in, the answer lay in a radio call to base and a lot of ‘back at the office’ searching. We needed a mobile solution that would enable officers to quickly answer three questions:
- Who have I stopped?
- Can they hurt me?
- Do I need to take any action?
Information is sourced from multiple back end systems, and can be both difficult and time consuming to interpret. Searches typically return multiple records for each person, vehicle, address, and offense. Consider the following challenges:
- How do you identify a vehicle when license plates have been swapped between one vehicle and another?
- How do you spot a dangerous criminal when faced with 25 different records on every offence from a parking ticket to a murder?
- How do you enable some officers to focus on traffic offenses, whilst others focus on warrants for arrest?
We needed a way to quickly tell the police what they needed to know, and present it in a way they could easily and quickly navigate. Our solution included information design, search result aggregation, flagging critical information, and ensuring consistency across multiple devices and screen sizes.
We introduced the concept of four key entities – person, vehicle, occurrence, and address. By designing all aspects of the user interface around these four key elements we were able to aggregate search results around like (but not formally linked) items and tell a story would have otherwise remained hidden.
This enabled different users to follow different links depending on what they were looking for. Traffic police might be looking for blue flagged vehicles (indicating an expired registration) whilst other officers might check out a red flagged person with a history of firearms offences.
Due to popular demand, the 50 iPad strong pilot has already been expanded to 395 devices with plans for a roll out to 1200 devices in time for November’s G20 summit. Initial estimates show a reduction in office administration of 25%, allowing officers on the road to get more work done.