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greatness and danger in police car computers

Last week Maj. Mark Sullivan, Deputy Chief of my local police department showed me the way their patrol cars are set up with communications and computer interactive systems. I gather the older versions, before they were based around ruggedized laptops, were called Mobile Data Terminals, so you'll see the "MDT" terminology still.

They are, in many ways, a dream of location services, context and data availability:

• A computer allows the officer in the field to look up licenses, take reports and do other tasks without paper or slow voice communications back to the dispatcher.
• The location is constantly broadcast over a data network, right to the dispatchers' screens. No more "anyone in the area" calls; the closest available vehicle can be sent to a call.
• The dispatcher can send data to the cabin terminal; not everything is sent over voice, so there is less chance of garbled communications, less clutter on the voice channel, and some data will be much more speedily delivered.
• When the car pulls into the police department parking lot, say at the end of the shift, it comes into range of a dedicated high-speed wireless network. The video filmed during the shift is automatically downloaded and indexed to location and other data known or recorded.

I run a plate on my MDT and I can have a photo of the registered owner of the car in about 5 seconds. I'm typing on one right this moment, these things are awesome.

–Cleveland area police officer

But could all this access to information, and communications be a hazard? While the risk of distracted driving while talking on mobiles is apparently very low, the danger from actually looking down at screens is much more immediate and obvious.

Entering license plate information – and reading the response – while still moving may improve safety by presenting the officer with critical information (it's wanted in connection with an armed robbery!), but it's also a risk since the officer cannot be paying as much attention to driving, what is happening in the vehicle being stopped, or the rest of their surroundings, like other traffic.

And what about writing reports in the car?

A thirty-year-old officer was sitting in his patrol car in the middle of a busy shopping center parking lot, under a bright light. He was catching up on a couple of reports, using the patrol car's computer. Unfortunately, he lost awareness of the peripheral area.

Another vehicle pulled along side the passenger side of his patrol car. The dirtbag driver leveled a shotgun at the unassuming officer and slaughtered him. The cop's report ended abruptly, mid-sentence. The cop never saw the danger coming.

This is from an article entitled Is your Patrol Car Computer Going to Kill You? by Jim Donahue. He's a police officer in Florida, who has started training programs for mobile computers.

He teaches a class on "technology and tactics." Much like firearms training teaches officers not just the skills of hitting a target but when to use appropriate force, these classes are about how to use your technology as a tactical item. How it influences your work and the implications of using computers, phones, radios and other technology for the job.

While I am leery of training to overcome design issues, this is training to avoid procedural errors. And fixing the procedures can certainly help. The trend, as in all industries, is to get more and more out of your workers, so it is typical for patrol officers to spend their downtime in the field writing reports. As Major Sullivan says, "To write a good, cohesive report you gotta be focused; you can't be looking up every thirty seconds to see what's around you, which you should do if you are out." So it's not even just an issue of safety, but of getting good output from all facets of the officer. To that end, some departments do specifically encourage only note-taking in the field; reports are written after the shift, in the office.

Jim Donahue teaches his students that when they do have to perform paperwork in their car, there are ways to alleviate the awareness issues: find a quiet spot, back the car against a wall or other obstruction, roll the windows down and turn down the radios. And park on gravel if at all possible. You cannot be surprised by anyone walking up, and ought to have time to react if anything interesting happens.

Of course, some of these issues, and solutions, did exist in paper-report days. But shouldn't interactive systems be able to assist better, and be able to improve the situation? They certainly should not hurt, but even maintaining a flawed status quo aggravates the designer in me.

Some of this does seem to be happening. The Mission, KS police will be moving to a new system when their next vehicles arrive, with a smaller touchscreen and keyboard, mounted just below eye level. They are on movable arms to provide access to the vehicle stereo and climate controls, as well as to make the typing position more comfortable, while staying well away from airbags and the driver's body in case of an accident. Officers in other departments with systems like this to tend to say it brings ergonomics, usefulness and visibility up past any pre-computer systems.

These sorts of improvements seem to be moving into the mainstream slowly. The software, and device interaction in general, is an entirely different field, also with wildly variable results. Most of the software started life as desktop data entry systems. Many are simply compressed to fit the smaller screens, and are therefore quite difficult to use. Important functions of the software, or the computer system itself (dimming, or night modes) are often difficult to access, or impossible to decipher without training, which may not be available or comprehensive enough.

All of these are failures of basic mobile principles. Despite being vehicle mounted systems (mostly), the core concepts are the same:

• Glanceable
• Contextually presents information
• Contextually prepared for input
• Personalized
• Always on and always ready
• Obvious and predictable interface

These systems do some of this wonderfully, but generally fail on at least one critical area.

Since I don't think most of our readers don't build life/health/safety devices, you might wonder how this applies to you? Well, this is an excellent case study of a possible future of mobility in many ways. First, the hardware gives capabilities not far from many consumer mobiles. Multiple radios, location services, video, text communications. To get to this level of contextual behavior only takes a dream and some software. Why shouldn't my phone be able to recognize when it is within range of my desktop computer, and automatically use the bluetooth connection to download video to the correct folder?

Risks of heads-down behavior are, as I mentioned already, obvious for consumers on mobiles, and promise to get worse with increasing use of data services (and to my surprise still no voice-xml accompanying the text and graphic output).

But even aside from safety, simply missing out on meetings or family christmases, angering your boss or grandma and generally not engaging with the world is whole new class of risk that is almost the opposite of how mobile devices should be helping users interact with their world

And if you do work on public safety, communications, telematics or military systems, please do try to make them the best interfaces you can.

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