A scheme to use smartphones and gadgets to help police on the beat appears to have had a limited success at best.
The National Audit Office has criticised the implementation of an £80 million scheme that involved around 41,000 devices going to officers. Most of the gadgets were BlackBerry handsets.
The idea was to make it easier for police to deal with administration such as filing crime reports while out on the beat rather than having to return to the office. However, the NAO found that the average time saved has worked out at just 18 minutes a shift, and in some cases officers actually spent as much as 109 extra minutes in the station, though it's not clear if and how this was a direct result of using the phones.
The problem seems to have been a lack of co-ordination and planning about who would get the devices and how they would be used. One force only had enough devices for 1% of its force, while another ended up with an average of 1.5 handsets per officer.
