Cutting-edge tech for departmental accountability. A Geotab Success Story.

Modern policing has become more reliant on leveraging data and its benefits are not just confined to the officer’s day-to-day duties. The advent of telematics and real-time tracking has shown how being able to monitor officers is critical for their own safety and their citizens, as well as how enhancing dispatch capabilities results in sending response teams to an incident in minutes. It’s ultimately why the Belleville Police Service knew they needed to take a data-driven approach to maximize departmental efficiency and accountability.

“The reason that we were looking for telematics in our vehicles was we believed that we were missing so many key elements about either the officers’ driving, the officers’ equipment and malfunctions in that vehicle,” says Mike Callaghan, the chief of the Belleville Police Service. “Information such as speed, braking, having a look at how the vehicle was operating, were the emergency lights on, was the siren on? Those are all very, very strong considerations when we’re looking at liability in a collision. So, we felt that having that information was going to be very, very critical to us being able to defend the actions of the officers.”

Loading the department’s 31 vehicles with telematics technology would deliver this data, but also something equally as important for a modern police force.

“Let’s be very frank, in the world of policing right now, we’ve seen a significant change in the perception and the accountability components within our policing,” says Callaghan. “There’s an old saying that ‘Not only must you appear to be transparent, but you must be transparent.’ And that’s where we believe that we’re headed with the telematics data. The tech journey is one, I think, that every police service should be looking at and moving down towards, because at the end of the day, we have to be accountable.”