When is your location information the most important piece of information? And not to you, but your peers? If you’re a cop in trouble. And you often may be in a position or situation where you cannot ‘speak’ even to your wireless police communication system, because it may be that some drug-dealing criminal with an Uzi is trying to find out where you are… Yes, the US police do truly have that need; they want their dispatchers to know where they are, so if in trouble, they can summons help without speaking. So what do we give them? A Blackberry and PocketCop as explained in the Mobile Industry Review.
The City of Baltimore is a typical major US city with its share of violent crime [as popularized by legendary Homicide: Life on the Street and recently, HBO’s TV series The Wire]. They tested the PocketCop with 80 BlackBerry handsets. It had typical police-work type of uses, like looking up suspicious car license plates, collecting the crime history of suspects, and with Blackberry cameras, many cameraphone-related uses obviously from collecting digital pictures to sharing images. And being a Blackberry the police officers can communicate silently using the QWERTY keypad and Blackberry Instant Messenger. Best of all its the most secure mobile phone system so it can’t be easily hacked by criminals and the Baltimore police department can instantly disable any of its Blackberries remotely if one is stolen etc. All good.
So they bought 80 Blackberries and trialed the system. The police department loved it so much, and found it was so useful in police work they bought 2,000 Blackberries. Remember what Howard Rheingold wrote in Smart Mobs in 2002 – Mobile phones “amplify human talents for cooperation.” Police officers need to cooperate. That is why when radio communications were very expensive in the 1930s and 1940s, it was police cars who started to get the expensive radio communications and today we can’t imagine a cop car being without a radio communication unit. But the Blackberry with PocketCop enables everything that the traditional car-based police radio system allowed, and it adds all the instant messaging, social networking and cameraphone based collaboration. And yes, for the police officer’s safety, it allows constant monitoring in real time where each cop is. Wonderful!
For those who think – Tomi you have now contradicted yourself – no I have not. I have always said that niche-oriented location based services can be very successful from parcel-tracking to pay-as-you-drive car insurance to your hunting dog-tracker. But that mass-market location based services are the biggest waste of money going in mobile. So yes, I celebrate all successes in mobile and this PocketCop is truly a wonderful service that I hope every cop department will evaluate and adopt as soon as possible.
Editor’s note:
The article originally appeared at Communities Dominate Brands blog. You can find out more about Tomi Ahonen here.
Original Author: Tomi Ahonen
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