Brit coppers are not getting enough benefits from their £80m splurge on BlackBerrys and other mobile devices, the National Audit Office has said. The NAO reckons that the bobbies are only getting a "basic level" of benefit from the programme to equip them with mobes, mostly that they can pound the pavements for a bit longer. …

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Friday 27th January 2012 13:09 GMT Paul_Murphy

OWL

I would like to say that our local police make excellent use of twitter (at least) to let people know what is occurring; traffic problems, (anti) burglary advice, appeals for information etc.

My advice to officers who may have one of these devices is to think outside the box a little and see how you can get your customers/ community more involved with your work.

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Friday 27th January 2012 13:17 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson

I thought they stored comms gear in their helmets

OK, it's Friday, innit?

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Friday 27th January 2012 13:23 GMT Anonymous Coward

It would be nice to know whether the survey was voluntary to complete and what checks were performed as to the accuracy of the data by the NAO.

If the survey was voluntary and no checks were performed then the true story could be much worse.

Investigative journalism or copy n paste?

Cheers

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1. Friday 27th January 2012 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward 101
  
  I think the NAO are pretty good at working out if they are being fed a yarn; otherwise the story would be 'data on police Blackberry usage to poor to work out if program is a success or failure'.
  
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Friday 27th January 2012 14:25 GMT mark 63

I cant off the top of my head think hoe a blackberry would assist a police officer,

Especially as , as reported last week , they seem to need the help of the speaking clock to tell the time.

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Friday 27th January 2012 14:26 GMT Graham Marsden

Typical managerial incompetence...

... How could something like this go ahead without someone saying "Ok, we've got X many Officers in this area, so we need X BlackBerrys"??

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Friday 27th January 2012 14:27 GMT John Riddoch

Er, what?

"but it hadn't really examined the need for the devices or how they should be used." - so they went out to buy a pile of expensive kit without any plans for what to do with them or even ascertain if they were required? Sorry, but that kind of process needs someone to get a good kicking.

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1. Friday 27th January 2012 15:05 GMT The Cube
  
  John, you've clearly never been involved in procurement..
  
  In any large corporate or government funded org the way procurement works is that the sales gimp for the vendor humps the leg of the budget holder in the target customer until they give in and say "I need to demonstrate how this investment will yield cost savings". The sales gimp then goes round the target org and finds all the expensive inefficiencies they can and makes up completely unrealistic ways in which their magic tech could, in another universe, downhill with a following wind, reduce these inefficiency costs. These costs, by the way, are guessed at by the sales gimp because the corporate / government funded agency is completely unable to explain any of it's costs, it is too busy being an inefficient corporate (or in the case of the Met killing civilians and evading prosecution). The sales gimp then adds up the total guess (erm cost) and this is presented as the "saving".
  
  Fast forward a couple of years and shock, horror! none of the savings have materialised but the sales gimp has his / her commission and the purchasing budget holder has moved on to another job based on the enormous imaginary cost savings they "achieved" in their previous role, having carefully legged it before anyone realised there was nothing behind the curtain.
  
  The fact that the NAO finds any improvement should be cause for celebration for anything that has gone through government procurement, look on the bright side, they could have spent all that money with Capita....
  
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Friday 27th January 2012 14:35 GMT Anonymous Coward

80m on blackberry's - seriously?

80m is a hell of a lot of money to be spending and for mobile phones for police it does somewhat seem expensive compared to the total value of the company there buying from. 80m is near on 10% of a billion and RIM is currently values way down on that scale. So in effect I'm reading how the police effectifly brought a 2.28% of a company, but in a way that they didn't.

That sure is some expensive tweets.

Didn't I read not long ago how alot of them were using there own phones!

Were the Police asked if they needed blackberry's or was this some form of pre-Olympic rehearsal plan for central London?

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Friday 27th January 2012 15:19 GMT Anonymous Coward

heh

Its kinda hard to incite riots on BBM and thus incur all that lovely over time without Blackberrys....

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Friday 27th January 2012 15:27 GMT Wupspups

Lets save money!

So what was all that dosh that went on TETRA for? I thought it was to save them money by having an integrated reliable and flexibly comms system. Oh but raido is so 20th Century. Crapberry is so much more relieable.

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1. Sunday 29th January 2012 11:57 GMT Frank Bough
  
  this may shock you, but...
  
  ...mobile telephones use radio to communicate with their basestations.
  
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Friday 27th January 2012 15:31 GMT Anonymous Coward

No much use...

Compared to a Storno radio a Blackberry's not much use for stoving someone's head in, just ask Blair Peach...

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1. Friday 27th January 2012 19:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Ah, proper old skool police brutality.
  
  They just don't make the kit like they used to.
  
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Friday 27th January 2012 19:20 GMT Chrissy

Some idle googling and playing in Excel

Number of Police (entire UK Aug 2011) 137,000

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-number-police)

Total Spend on Mobile Devices

80m + 29m = £109m

(Source: NAO / this article)

Backend Infrastructure:

Max number of users per B'berry Enterprise Server = approx 2000

So 137,000 users / 2000 = 69 servers @ £5000 TCO per server = £345,000

109,000,000 less 345,000 = £108,655,000 left to spend on the actual devices

Devices:

So Device spend available per officer = 108,655,000 / 137,000 = £793 per device

Average no contract price of the newest highest end Blackberry: £440

(Source: http://www.puremobile.co.uk/BlackBerry/BlackBerry-Bold-Touch-9900/)

So required actual spend to equip 137,000 officers each with their own £440 Blackberry = £60,280,000

So profit made by whoever got this plum contract = 109m - 60m = £49million pickpocketed out of your taxes.

WTF???

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1. Friday 27th January 2012 23:28 GMT John Brown (no body)
  
  "...and other mobile devices..."
  
  In the video on the Beeb website, the officer interviewed has a second Blackberry "welded" to a portable fingerprint scanner and reckoned his mobile technology saved him 2-4 hours per day.
  
  Whether this is typical or overly optimistic is unconfirmed ;-)
  
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2. Saturday 28th January 2012 20:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Excelent list of calulations though at the end it needs to have perhaps -
  
  Cost to TAX payer - priceless
  
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Friday 27th January 2012 19:41 GMT Slipgate

I have an idea of how gov procurement works (through a friend of mine) it doesn't sound efficient. However, if the NAO has found these issues (obviously don't know what the KPIs, requirements initially or even if this stuff was needed) wouldn't the logical thing be to 'send them in' as consultants to work out the best way forward. You'll have to excuse me if I'm bringing in too much logic to the situation!!!

Of course, I dunno if the vendor(s) were schmoozing the people who hold the purse strings... Or am I being too cynical?

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Saturday 28th January 2012 16:52 GMT Anonymous Coward

Hmm

They would have been better off buying all the officers etch a sketches for all the bloody good a blackberry is / will be used for.

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1. Sunday 29th January 2012 11:49 GMT oddie
  
  angry birds?
  
  Might not have as many apps as android/apple in their appstore, but with the more secure system + ability to run their own servers, properly encrypt/wipe devices remotely u would think bb's would be most suited of all the big vendors for this purpose..
  
  (there are other vendors who specialise in secure mobile communications, but i have no idea if they have ever had to scale to cover an entire countrys police force??
  
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Monday 30th January 2012 09:52 GMT Ascylto

23456

Why not issue them with PlayBooks? At least they could use them to hit (sorry, placate) offenders as they fall down the steps.

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