From arrest to booking-in, police officers must act quickly, making no mistakes. Policing is always under pressure to use resources efficiently, but in reality there is no ideal ‘steady flow’ of arrests. Custody suite cells can become unavailable while an arresting officer is en route. Arresting officers will often have their own opinion around which custody suite is the most appropriate for a detainee. However, they will likely have no knowledge of workload or available services. Specialist equipment or personnel might be needed but unavailable at certain suites. The result is confusion, delays, and even relocations. Whether at the point of arrest or at the custody suite, these issues increase risk, and impact the availability of custody officers and arresting officers. Police forces are also under pressure to reduce estate costs, with potential impact to travel times and officer availability.
Optimise the use of your custody resources and simplify the process for the arresting officer with our Cell Allocation Management System (CAMS). CAMS equips your custody suites and arresting officers with force-wide awareness of availability, so they can handle surges and save time at arrest and at the custody suite. CAMS allows the arresting officer to book the most appropriate cell for the detainee’s requirements themselves, automatically updating custody staff.
Reference Customer Experience
In active use, one force made a conservative assessment of time savings (not accounting for relocation reduction benefits) which showed a minimum 15 minutes saved per arrest – benefitting frontline officer availability, reducing load on custody officers and reducing risk. This translates into resource savings equivalent to hundreds of thousands of pounds annually. Contact us to get an estimate for your force!
- Significant cost savings and compelling return on investment
- significant overhead reduction for PACE Inspectors
- complete removal of custody control and contact centre involvement for the cell allocation process
- referenceable savings equivalent to 3-4 full time employees.
- improved arresting officer availability
- cost neutral in the first year
- Time savings
- Quicker and smoother request and cell allocation process
- Reduction in arresting officer turnaround time by several minutes
- Reduced risk
- fewer relocations and delays
- Morale boost
- anecdotal reports of significant reduction in stress for PACE Inspectors and across the team
Under the bonnet, CAMS uses a genetic breeding AI algorithm to examine thousands of combinations and factors, intelligently picking the best available custody suite. Expected and predictive occupancy and near real-time cell occupation are all taken into account, as well as workload, travel time and wait times. The result is faster, more reliable decisions for the choice of custody suite, with less time spent on the radio at the point of arrest, fewer bottlenecks during booking-in, fewer transfers and higher officer availability.
By answering just eight simple Yes / No questions, CAMS calculates the most appropriate cell based upon availability, location and travel time, workload and detainee requirements, with the whole process taking less than a minute.
Arresting Officer Mobile View
Custody Suite Dashboard
The following screenshots give an overall sense of the predictive and current occupancy displays; options for manual override etc.
Note: all screenshots are test data but based on a reference customer’s estate and are therefore redacted.
Key Features
- Mobile for arresting officers – with configurable recommendations based on arrest circumstances, suite capacity, predicted availability, travel time…
- Custody dashboard – with capacity, equipment availability…
- Predictive occupancy – based on past trends, customisable to handle unusual events (for example a demonstration or protest)
- Predictive performance – compares current workload against expected occupancy
- Specialist resource view – availability of health professionals and equipment (e.g. Camic intoximeter)
- Force wide – giving you a joined up view of capacity across all custody suites. Includes the size of suites, capacity of male and female cells, dry cells…
- Two-way feedback – via a categorised message feed including information on the arresting officer, detainee, allocation details, and estimated time of arrival
CAMS saves your force time and resources – for arresting officers and custody officers, at arrest, in travel and wait times right through to the booking-in process. A proven case study is available upon request.