Metropolitan Police to introduce tracking

Reported by The Telegraph earlier this week is the announcement from that Metropolitan Police Force that they will be participating in a two month trial of an Automatic Person Location System (APLS), a form of GPS tracking, to trace the locations of officers on the beat.

This comes as a result of Sir Paul Stephenson’s proposal that police officers patrol London on their own, rather in pairs as they do now.

The initiative will reportedly cost £2.2 million and will be rolled out across other London boroughs once the results of the trial in Kensington and Chelsea have been analysed.

The GPS tracking technology will be incorporated into their radio handsets. The system plots an officer’s current location and movements (snail trail) against a map of the area where they are situated.

The APLS tracking system will increase the Mets ability to respond to an officer in urgent need of assistance as the current system only provides the officer id and not their location. With APLS, when the ‘emergency button’ on the handset is pressed, the Police control centre will be able to identify the officer in need of assistance and quickly pinpoint the officer’s current location.

Some Met officers have raised concerns stating they will not be safe and in response senior force officials have assured that officers will be able to be located at anytime.