The Hradec Kralove City Police Department has been GPS monitoring its vehicles for five years and it was one of the first organizations to utilize a system like that. Last year, the system was significantly enhanced from the technological and content point of view and we think we should mention the project here and describe the new features that have been incorporated.

How does the system work?

The system is basically very simple. The monitored object (a vehicle and, newly, individual police officers as well) is equipped with GPS transmitters. At any given time, the GPS knows its location, the instantaneous speed, the travel azimuth, and other information that is transmitted by radio waves to the city police control room and saved to a database there. The data is then sent to the T-WIST system where a special database application is available and the visualization is then carried out by an applicable T-MapServer map project. Consequently, the police control room staff can monitor the vehicles, or officers, on-line and respond to the newly-developed situations immediately.

Web database application

The web database application is, on the whole, a very simple application in which each GPS entry is stored (millions of entries). The individual records are collected on-line from the GPS and every day there are about 10 000 new entries. Each entry includes the identification number of the object, the time of entry, coordinates, object’s speed, etc. Each entry can be viewed in the map project. Newly, the entries can also be viewed in graph that very clearly shows the speed of a vehicle (or if the vehicle was parked) during the day.

Map project

The map project includes the map of house numbers which enables the police control room staff to navigate an officer directly to the house doors. In addition, there is also a map layer that shows the location of all in the city and the staff can look up and localize (just like in the case of house numbers) any light pole by its identification number. Since each city light pole is marked with its own ID number, they all become important localization elements for the control room staff and officers in field. The map project also features a dynamic layer of GPS points that enables the localization of any database record (i.e. the location of vehicle D in time X) or the movement of a vehicle during certain period of time. In the latter case, the user selects the object and the time span that she/he wants to view and the map draws the route along which the object traveled. The route is made up of points from which the GPS information was transmitted and each point is shown as an arrow indicating the direction of the object’s movement.

Why to monitor?

There are several reasons for the City Police Department to monitor its vehicles and officers. One of the main reasons is the fact that the police department knows, at any given time, the exact location of its officers and the control room staff can very easily respond in unexpected situations by looking up the nearest patrol officers and contacting them.
Another reason for monitoring is the documentation of the movement by which the police department can clearly prove how often the police officers check individual localities.
Last but not least, the system also serves in emergency situations. Each patrol vehicle is equipped with an emergency push button whose activation puts the patrol in direct contact with the control room and the staff is instantly informed on the patrol’s difficulties and can react accordingly.
The system of course features the control and analytical functions that enable the police headquarters to analyze the movement of officers (adequate utilization of vehicles, the frequency of inspections at different localities, etc.) and to check on the movement of patrols.

Further development …

The system is technologically demanding and its optimization and tuning – especially in the data collecting – is an ongoing process. There is of course the potential for further development in the analytic tasks, data evaluation, or route planning. Despite of these tasks still ahead of us, our system is already unique in our country and very unique in its scope (equipping the police cars and officers with GPS).