Siemens rolls out E80m police emergency call system

Siemens Business Services is set to complete the rollout of an E80m emergency call system that uses satellite navigation to speed up response times for the Italian Carabinieri police.

The system has been implemented in 113 cities across Italy, and 102 provincial command centres are linked up via GSM to 8,000 Carabinieri vehicles equipped with GPS satellite navigation technology. It is due to be completed later this year. The Carabinieri is the armed military part of Italian law enforcement that works alongside the regular police force.

The control centre in Rome alone receives over 6,000 emergency calls a day on the Carabinieri's 112 telephone number. The system automatically identifies the name and address of the caller on the basis of the telephone number and displays this information on a digital street map for the operator.

Colonnello Luigi Robusto, CIO at the Carabinieri said at a demonstration that the vehicles in the vicinity are identified on the map and alerted to the incident, with their subsequent movement tracked in real-time. The control centre can send text messages or use radio transmission to relay information on the scene and type of emergency.

Vehicle functions can also be controlled remotely from the control centre such as locking the doors and turning the engine off if the police have to leave the car quickly to give chase on foot, and the switching on of the 'blues and twos' - emergency lights and siren.

Officers on the beat are equipped with pocket PCs with a direct connection to the headquarters, allowing them to be located at any time and to carry out a variety of routine tasks.

The control centre system is based on the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server operating system and follows the recent trend of Siemens Business Services working closer with Microsoft.

However, speaking at a demonstration of the Carabinieri system in Rome, Paul A Stodden, group president of Siemens Business Services, said this does not mean the company is tying itself to one platform or ruling out working with open source technologies.

Stodden said spend on e-government and public sector IT services across Europe is currently booming because of various targets for putting services online.

"Unlike the industry sector, the government sector is growing fast. The government share of SBS was 20 per cent in 2002 and is growing," he said.