£6-million ipad trial Met Police still mulling other gadget options after £6-million iPad trial

[Reefa]

London's Metropolitan Police Service spent £6 million in 2014-2015 to trial the iPad Mini as the primary technology tool for its front-line forces. The costly initiative, however, did not result in any meaningful decision.

 

A Freedom of Information request submitted by V3 revealed that the trial, launched in July 2014, consisted of 641 devices rolled out to police officers in the Hammersmith and Fulham areas. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson told V3 that the devices are still being used.

 

Although £6 million might seem a lot for a few hundred tablets, the hardware itself set the police back only £1.2 million—that is including actual iPads, accessories, and servers for backend systems. Another £600,000 was spent on business and management activities, and £100,000 more on software licences.

 

The main area of expenditure, drawing a whopping £4.1 million, was software development. The set of tools for police officers created in-house included traditional e-mail and calendar platforms, as well as more specialised systems like Merlin (a crime reporting system), a system for child protection and vulnerable victims, stop-and-search, and an app for taking witness statements.

 

As of March 2015, 8,500 statements had been taken with police iPads. Back then, the trial was recognised as a success, with the Met planning to seek approval from its corporate governance board and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime to roll out at least 15,000 iPads across the entire force.

 

Apparently approval has not been granted, and the Met is still undecided on what mobile technology platform to pursue. The service hopes to move closer to making a decision later in 2016, though there's no strict deadline for doing so.

 

If iPads aren't selected, it still wouldn't mean that all £6 million had been completely wasted—at least the backend systems developed in 2014 could theoretically be used with other client devices.

 

In a related news, Surrey and Sussex police have recently received £250,000 from the "multi-million pound" Police Innovation Fund to buy four Aeryon SkyRanger drones in addition to one already working in Gatwick. In what will be the largest police drone trial in England and Wales, the UAVs will be deployed to Eastbourne Neighbourhood Response Team, Guildford Targeted Patrol Team, Gatwick Armed Response Vehicles, Shoreham Forensic Collision Investigation and Reconstruction Unit, and Lewes Operations Command Search and Operations Planning.

 

source

 

 

[luisam]

"As of March 2015" is more then 1 year ago

18 hours ago, Reefa said:

As of March 2015, 8,500 statements had been taken with police iPads. Back then, the trial was recognised as a success, with the Met planning to seek approval from its corporate governance board and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime to roll out at least 15,000 iPads across the entire force.

 

 

"As of March 15" was over a year ago and by now this "successful result" should have been updated for public knowledge. Is it more or less successful? So they spent "only £1.2 million" to buy 641 mini iPads - that should be about £1.872 for each one, 2800 USD at the exchange rate for that time. I don't remember the retail price of iPad but I bought an iPad 2 just about that date for about 400 UDS and the mini iPad was cheaper. Current price is about 240 USD.

By the way,  to spend  £4.1 millions on developing software for an experiment  covering just 641 iPads looks quite a significant amount. I'm not a London taxpayer but this kind of informatin should at least make me raise eyebrows. Being an experiment, I guess they could have used some commercially available stuff and decide to develop own sofware later.

[CODYQX4]

4 hours ago, luisam said:

"As of March 2015" is more then 1 year ago

 

"As of March 15" was over a year ago and by now this "successful result" should have been updated for public knowledge. Is it more or less successful? So they spent "only £1.2 million" to buy 641 mini iPads - that should be about £1.872 for each one, 2800 USD at the exchange rate for that time. I don't remember the retail price of iPad but I bought an iPad 2 just about that date for about 400 UDS and the mini iPad was cheaper. Current price is about 240 USD.

By the way,  to spend  £4.1 millions on developing software for an experiment  covering just 641 iPads looks quite a significant amount. I'm not a London taxpayer but this kind of informatin should at least make me raise eyebrows. Being an experiment, I guess they could have used some commercially available stuff and decide to develop own sofware later.

I wonder when we hear about these budgets, whether it is government stupidity/incompetence vs how much of that is going to black budgets to then be blamed on government stupidity/incompetence.