10111 switch-over "on track"

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 04 Dec 2007

The police are on track to switch over all calls placed in Gauteng to the 10111 centre in Midrand by mid-month.

President Thabo Mbeki opened the terrestrial trunked radio (Tetra)-enabled contact and command centre, in Midrand, in late October, calling it a major investment in the fight against crime.

When fully operational, the R600 million centre will be staffed by 112 police officers and civilians per 12-hour shift.

Employing geospatial programming, combined with Tetra tracking and a variety of databases to determine the scene of an incident, caller identity and the location of the nearest police officer, the centre should improve police reaction times and help fight crime.

When Mbeki visited the centre, only the Vaal Rand policing centre - one of six then serving Gauteng - had switched to the state-of-the-technology Midrand centre. Police managers at the time said the other contact centres would be systematically migrated by mid-December.

Asked this morning whether this was still the case, Gauteng police spokesman superintendent Eugene Opperman said the "roll-out is progressing well as anticipated and planned. So far we have only heard good words about the system from ground level."

Going transversal in Gauteng

Meanwhile, plans are afoot to link the 10111 centre with the Gauteng provincial government's R50 million twin disaster management and medical emergency command centres, also in Midrand.

Opened last month, the disaster centre also has a monitoring and reporting function, generating business intelligence for premier Mbhazima Shilowa and his Cabinet on service delivery in the province.

The centre already routinely monitors ambulance dispatch from the adjacent medical contact facility and will shortly also receive data from the SA National Roads Agency's intelligent traffic control post - another Midrand resident - a move that will allow the centre to better prevent or ameliorate the impact of major disasters.

For this reason, the centre will also have access to data generated at the Gautrain rapid rail control centre, currently under construction - also in Midrand.

VirtualAgility, a US disaster management company, provided the software that draws all the data streams together, says Anthony Askew, business development manager at Continuity SA, the company that hosts the centre at an undisclosed location.

The centre's director, Colin Deiner, says the IT solution "is the first of its kind in SA". Askew adds that even though he is a business continuity expert, he had never before seen software as powerful. And the hardware matches: the centre's server room is small, but harbours a tower with a 30TB capacity, most of which will be devoted to geospatial mapping.

The centre has 15 permanent staff, with more being drawn in from elsewhere in the provincial government when disaster strikes.

Deiner stresses the centre is "not a call centre, it is a command centre where executive decision-makers will meet to manage disasters" such as plane crashes, dam bursts and major fires.