Customer Story: Durham Regional Police
Faster Mobilization, Better Response: How Durham Regional Police Leverage BlackBerry AtHoc
Faster Mobilization, Better Response: How Durham Regional Police Leverage BlackBerry AtHoc
A young man fails to return from a camping trip. A stolen vehicle causes a dangerous car accident. A domestic violence event results in multiple calls to the police. These are just a few of the incidents that can occur under the watch of the DRPS, which serves the Region of Durham, a large upper-tier municipality situated just East of Toronto, Ontario. In a growing region made up of both urban and rural communities, response time is of the essence.
Enabling rapid mobilization of 19 specialized units to respond quickly and effectively to diverse and complex situations.
Rapidly expanded user adoption and scalability
Streamlined the process of activating callouts to improve efficiency in communication and mobilization.
Defending a Highly Diverse Jurisdiction
As one of the ten largest municipal police services in Canada, the Durham region encompasses everything from heavily populated urban centers to remote northern forests, DRPS also maintains multiple highly specialized units.
The diversity of the Durham Region requires many different styles of policing, resources, access times, and tactics – it’s one of our biggest challenges,” explains Paul Hallett, an Inspector at Durham Regional Police Service. “On the one hand, we have urban areas with a high concentration of crime and disorder. On the other, there are people who live in very rural, forested areas.
Prior to 2017, DRPS’s Communications / 911 staff relied primarily on group texts and emails to mobilize and inform first responders during critical incidents. Unfortunately, issuing notifications and collecting feedback was a highly manual process that required constant attention. Even as operators invented shortcuts to make the system more responsive, they found themselves struggling to maintain accurate lists and ensure consistent information delivery.
We continually strive to look at how we can improve our operational communications and identify innovative tools that will enhance our response time in critical moments,” says Christine Robson, IT Manager at DRPS. To enhance the process of communication, DRPS deployed BlackBerry AtHoc
Streamlining Emergency Response
How BlackBerry AtHoc transformed DRPS operations, mobilizing 19 specialty units with speed and precision
The Right Messages at the Right Time
DRPS initially implemented BlackBerry AtHoc for 80 first responders, with alerting capabilities via phone, email, SMS, and mobile. This allowed operators within the organization’s 911 operations emergency dispatch center to not only share information across multiple departments, but also to collect information from f ield personnel and ensure their safety. Following its initial success, DRPS added another 120 users to the system.
AtHoc Powers 19 Specialty Units with Precision
Since then, the organization has significantly expanded its AtHoc deployment, and now manages the mobilization of 19 different specialty units via AtHoc. “For each unit on AtHoc, we have a primary and a secondary list, based on the unit’s own schedule and reporting structure,” explains Hallett. “When there’s an incident, our operators simply pull up the needed distribution list and push out an alert to them for a primary callout. If they don’t receive a response in five minutes, they do the same thing with a secondary list – it’s become our preferred method of mobilization when we need to bring in specialized personnel.”
Saving People by Saving Time
Feedback around BlackBerry AtHoc has been highly positive, notes Hallett. Operators are pleased that they no longer must contend with phone trees and email chains — they can simply push a single button to issue whatever callouts are necessary. First responders, meanwhile, appreciate how much more efficiently information is both distributed and received. “AtHoc has been universally valuable in the amount of time and attention it’s saved our supervisors,” says Hallett. “Incidents that require special resources can be really hectic – being able to immediately activate those units takes away a huge burden.”
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