Twice in 2017, the 100pc armed Civil Nuclear Constabulary was used for wider counter-terror reassurance policing. To coordinate its staffing, initially the force used phone trees and pagers. Several officers at each site had a list they were required to contact in the event of a staff shortfall. This was time-consuming. The force sought a means of enabling two-way communication with a large number.
It began looking at crisis communication platforms. AtHoc Alert by BlackBerry is a two-way emergency alerting product, that’s able to send messages by text, email, phone, desktop, and radio. Recipients can reply with a variety of preconfigured responses. Joseph Shearer-Rust, Resilience Officer at CNC says: “We did a very detailed product assessment around lifetime cost, user friendliness, and functionality, comparing BlackBerry AtHoc against its leading competitors. “BlackBerry AtHoc ultimately won. We also found BlackBerry quite helpful in building out our ideas and our usage of their platform.”
As part of initial deployment, Shearer-Rust configured a template for each unit in the CNC and gave small groups of users at each site limited access. This allowed each unit to manage its own response to incidents and shortfalls, while still providing head office oversight into their usage. The force has also integrated AtHoc into its overtime management. CNC has reduced its average response time for major incidents from several hours to about 15 minutes – and further reduced response time for smaller urgent mobilisations. When additional staff are required, a unit no longer needs to send personnel to the office to man the phones. Instead, users press a button, send tailored alerts, and wait for a response. By making it quicker and easier to bring in people for overtime, an estimated £50,000-plus a year is saved, according to Shearer-Rust. The CNC has also used AtHoc to rid itself of pagers, saving another £30,000. A planned expansion will see this increase to an estimated £60,000.
Eventually, the CNC also intends to look into AtHoc Connect for inter-agency communication and AtHoc Collect for communication in the field. The CNC uses the product daily basis and has sent 2500 alerts over the past two years. Shearer-Rust says: “Historically, when an event would happen, we’d often pre-emptively prepare to deploy ‘just in case’ even if it wasn’t guaranteed that our help would be needed. Because of BlackBerry AtHoc, we can deploy with much shorter notice.”
Picture by Mark Rowe; CNC Project Servator patrol near Sellafield, west Cumbria, spring 2017.
