Modernizing policing in a developing country like India demands streamlined and updated systems. The police forces in the states of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP) in India have partnered with Hexagon Geospatial to set up emergency response systems. They have installed Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s software suite to handle emergency calls, dispatch officers, and respond to and manage incidents. It has established a state-wide central “Dial 100” Emergency Operation Center whose emergency response system uses Hexagon’s Intergraph Computer-Aided Dispatch (I/CAD) software to compile, analyze, and act on multi-agency data. The command and control operations are centralized and the emergency numbers consolidated into one number. The UP Police is the largest police force in India, and the system receives around 200,000 calls a day through the hotline services (landline, VoIP, social media, etc.). I/CAD helps the police departments to not only manage this huge amount of calls but also allows them to respond to the incidents through mapbased views of calls. It also shows a map-based view of events and units in the field. I/CAD allows citizens to upload videos, text messages, and images in their local language or English to a mobile application. This data can be linked to the scene of the incident. The calls received are also tagged with the location. This helps to track the events based on location and coordinate responses from multiple agencies. Hexagon’s software suite has significantly improved the working of these two police departments. Reducing incident response time is one of the most important goals for police departments, and the MP police has cut theirs from 30–60 minutes to 5 minutes, while the UP Police has been able to lower its time to 15 minutes. This has been made possible through a better understanding and analysis of the location and frequency of events, combined with the analytics.
Questions for Discussion
1. How can machine learning be incorporated in this case?
2. Can GPS tracking of field units help to further improve the system? Or will it be too much to handle?
3. What type of analytics are used here (descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive)? Why?
4. Which other field can use a similar strategy?