Wiltshire Police takes e-police initiative to become world's first force to put 'digital pen to paper'

Wiltshire Constabulary has just completed a six-week pilot scheme of a unique, state-of-the-art digital pen, which is being pioneered between the force and Hewlett-Packard Ltd (HP), and is the world's first police force to undertake this trial.

Known for its pioneering stance in e-policing initiatives, Wiltshire Constabulary agreed to the trial as it has worked closely with HP on a number of e-policing projects over the last five years and above all, is always looking at ways of reducing the administrative burden, as well as increasing the time officers spend on the streets.

The HP Forms Automation System is a customised end-to-end enterprise solution that revolutionizes the way data for paper forms is gathered and processed, using an innovative technology called Digital Pen and Paper. Wiltshire Constabulary has many processes relying on paper forms and the project group was interested in trying this system in order to assess its impact on data capture efficiency, versus officer convenience.

The group identified the non-endorsable Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) form for the pilot, which was carried out by eight officers from the traffic division and involved staff from the IT department as well as a non-endorsable FPN officer from the Central Ticket Office (CTO) in Chippenham.

The pilot was to test whether the traffic officers could work moreefficiently by using the HP Digital Pen 200 and a digital pen enabled version of the existing form; whether the form data was effectively transmitted once the pen was docked in its cradle 'back at base' and how accurate the form data would be running on the Fixed Penalty computer system.

In order to limit the expense of the exercise and to yield quick results, certain limitations were agreed to the functionality, which would not detract from proving the technology concepts involved. HP provided four digital pens and a cradle, plus the specially designed pre-printed FPN forms and installed ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) software for handwriting recognition. IT staff from Wiltshire Constabulary manually transferred data files on a daily basis for the purposes of the pilot.

In theory, when used in conjunction with a specially-designed FPN form, the digital pen would process data as soon as it is docked and transmit via the computer system directly to the computer screens in the CTO, meaning that staff would not have to process the fixed penalty ticket 'paperwork' in the same way as they do under the current system, thus allowing them more time for correspondence around disputed tickets and ultimately saving not only inputting time, but also the relative cost of this. During the six-week period, a total of eight traffic officers trialled the pens and collectively completed a total of 117 notices using the special forms, of which some 52% were totally accurate, rising to 65% once certain facts had been taken into account, while the remainder needed some manual input. No system failures were encountered, although several docking errors occurred, which resolved when the computer was re-booted. Now that the pilot has ended, HP will continue to develop the system for future use in policing.

Sgt Craig Hardy, on behalf of the Traffic Department, who himself piloted one of the digital pens, said afterwards: 'The pen is quite chunky and the cap doesn't fit on the other end while in use, but otherwise, I had no problem using it. Out of the eight officers in total who use the HP pen, only one person found it hard to write with, due to its large size. I dropped my pen on the road a couple of times and it was left in a hot car for hours on end, neither of which caused any damage, so the pens are pretty robust.'

'There was about a 20 - 30 second wait from docking the pen in its cradle until the data appeared on screen and a couple of times I had to reboot the computer, otherwise it was fine to use. The new smaller form was no problem, although you have to write very clearly, without joining up your caps, to ensure the letter recognition system works accurately, which might irritate some officers!'

'I think the whole pilot project is a good idea, but will need a bit of fine-tuning. It won't save us any time however, but I can see the benefits for the staff in the CTO to have the data already on their system, rather than having to wait several days for us to send the forms to the CTO in the internal mail system'.