The Mountain View, California, Police Department (MVPD) is testing a mobile phone tracking application from Polaris Wireless to provide commanding officers with visibility of where on-duty officers are located.
The Polaris Wireless Altus blue force tracking application has already been used to augment police safety measures at a recent area concert. Altus was used to locate and track over twenty uniformed and plain-clothes police officers during the two-day concert, during which the MVPD conducted approximately 100 arrests. During this pilot deployment, some officers were equipped with department-provided mobile phones, which were monitored using Polaris Wireless Altus from a command post set up in the event grounds.
Altus blue force tracking provides police departments and other law enforcement organizations with the ability to track police and other field officers (such as firefighters and emergency medical services (EMS) technicians), specifically when they are out of reach of their patrol vehicles, which typically contain separate location and tracking capabilities. San Francisco-based Locaid, the world’s largest LaaS (Location-as-a-Service) company, provided the officers’ location information, which was then displayed on the Altus tracking application. As a result, MVPD commanders were able to track officers’ movements during the concert. Altus provides a more efficient and less obvious way of tracking an officer’s location than traditional 2-way radio and verbal alerts.
“In an ongoing effort to ensure the safety of the citizens of Mountain View, we continually seek out industry-leading technology that enables us to do our jobs more safely and efficiently,” said Lieutenant Chris Hsiung of the Mountain View Police Department. “The power of the Polaris Wireless Altus application to locate officers via mobile devices presents us with many exciting opportunities.”
http://www.polariswireless.com
