Apr 04, 2013In an effort to improve efficiencies, reduce costs and better secure its uniforms, weapons and other law-enforcement gear, the Richardson Police Department (RPD), in Texas, is employing a RFID-enabled asset-tracking solution. In the months since the system's implementation, the department has cut approximately a half hour from the time that it takes to verify all equipment within a squad car at the start and end of a shift—30 minutes that each officer can now use to patrol the streets. Not only is the system improving police work, but the department estimates that it saves about $9,000 per car annually in terms of labor costs and improved inefficiencies.
The police department is utilizing a solution developed by GlobeRanger that features its GR-AWARE PD software. GR-AWARE (GlobeRanger Asset Watching and Reporting Engine) is built on GlobeRanger's iMotion platform (available as both an on-premises and cloud-based solution), and is designed to work with a variety of RFID and/or bar-code hardware. GR-AWARE PD is tailored for police departments, explains Eric Pearson, GlobeRanger's director of engineering, but the company also offers a GR-AWARE solution suitable for a broader range of industries, including retail, as well as a GR-AWARE FD version for fire departments. In addition, the firm offers GR-AWARE Hazmat, designed for the hazardous materials industry and currently being used by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The RPD has attached a variety of Xerafy's ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) EPC Gen RFID 2 tags to its equipment, as well as sewn washable laundry tags from Fujitsu Frontech North America into the uniforms, Pearson says. Due to the demanding, read-on-metal requirements, GlobeRanger enlisted Xerafy to help it identify the best tags and adhesives for the RPD project. Among the Xerafy tags chosen for the RPD are the Dot-On XS tags, used on cell phones; the Dash-On XS tags, utilized for tracking voice recorders; and the Pico series and NanoX II tags, used on a variety of other assets. For handguns and other items requiring low-profile tags, the department is employing Xerafy's Titanium Metal Skin, a small, thin on-metal RFID label measuring 1.77 inches by 0.22 inch by 0.03 inch (45 millimeters by 5.6 millimeters by 0.8 millimeter). The Titanium Metal Skin is made with Impinj's Monza 5 chip, offering a serialized 48-bit tag ID and 128 bits of user memory, and can be printed with a bar code or human-readable text.
According to Pearson, all of the tags were pre-encoded with a unique serial number and were permanently attached to assets. For example, he says, the shotguns within each patrol car have Xerafy Titanium Metal Skin tags permanently sealed inside the stocks, where they are out of the way, while rifles have Xerafy Versa Trak tags sealed in the receivers. Recently, the department expanded its use of RFID to track all of its city-owned office and IT equipment, including printers, computers, chairs, desks and more. For those assets, UHF EPC Gen 2 tags supplied by Avery Dennison have been affixed directly to each item's surface. In total, the department is currently utilizing more than 6,000 RFID tags.
The Richardson Police Department commenced its use of RFID in September 2011, as part of an initiative to track uniforms and ensure that they did not end up in the wrong hands. That project was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Pearson says. However, the department quickly determined that expanding the initiative to all police gear made sense, and within a month, many of the assets were tagged. Seamstresses were set up to sew in the laundry tags, he explains, while GlobeRanger established a team to tag items in assembly-line fashion. The staging took approximately two weeks, and included almost all equipment assigned to officers and cars, including citation printers, shotguns, handguns, radar units and uniforms. GlobeRanger integrated its software with the department's human resources (HR) system, as well as with an employee ID access system leveraging high-frequency (HF) RFID tags embedded in ID cards.
At the Richardson Police Department's quartermaster station, each officer reports in to collect and return his or her uniform and equipment when a shift starts and ends. GlobeRanger developed a smart table that includes an Impinj Speedway Revolution R420 interrogator. Upon arriving at the quartermaster station, an officer presents his or her ID card, which is read by an HF reader, and that information is then recorded in the system. The employee information pops up on the computer screen, indicating the officer's role and what gear he or she is supposed to have. This information is all culled from the HR system integrated with the GR-AWARE software. The quartermaster pulls the items from inventory and places them on the smart table, which automatically reads the unique ID encoded to each item's tag. The tag information then populates the system and is displayed on the screen, and a checkout confirmation number is created and also displayed. The reverse occurs when an officer returns gear.
Patrol officers also use five Motorola Solutions MC 3190-Z RFID handheld readers to conduct inventory counts of the equipment within their cars. The patrol officers previously had to manually perform these inventory processes for their cars—documenting the serial numbers of each shotgun, radar unit and other equipment—by writing all of the information down and manually entering it into a system. It could take up to 15 minutes to complete this task, and it had to be done at the beginning and end of each patrol officer's shift.
The Motorola reader automatically identifies all assets within the vehicle, recording their serial numbers along with a time and date stamp of the transaction. The device automatically issues an alert in the event that any assets that are supposed to be in the vehicle are discovered to be missing. The data is uploaded to the GR-AWARE software, thereby updating the chain-of-custody record to track which officer last had each specific piece of equipment. There are 44 vehicles currently inventoried using the RFID system. The handhelds can also be used to find items; for example, the department can perform a sweep of the locker room to locate a missing asset.
During a presentation to the Richardson City Council, Police Chief Jimmy Spivey told council members, "The biggest bang for our buck—not just from a homeland security point of view—is knowing where these police uniforms are. But it used to take an officer about 10 to 15 minutes to go to a briefing, go out in parking lot, inventory their car, log onto the system and catalog their inventory into the system so they checked out their equipment out every day. Now, they take a handheld reader, take it out to the car, open the door, scan the equipment, ping it, and it uploads the data into the computer, and in less than a minute they are ready to roll. So if you multiply 15 minutes a day times all these officers, every day of the week, it is a massive time-saver." Spivey will present a case study discussing his department's RFID implementation at RFID Journal LIVE! 2013, being held from Apr. 30 to May 2 at the Orange County Convention Center, in Orlando, Fla.
Additionally, the department is using RFID to track and inventory all of the equipment within its mobile command center— a trailer that the RPD can set up to provide law-enforcement services at disaster sites, special events and crime scenes. According to Pearson, the department is utilizing a laptop-based inventory application and a Bluetooth-enabled RFID reader provided by GAO RFID.
GlobeRanger estimates that the police department is saving about $9,000 per car annually, due to reduced labor costs and improved efficiencies, the RFID system is also helping the department save money thanks to more accurate inventory. Because the GR-AWARE software is integrated with the police department's HR and employee ID systems, if a personnel change requires an officer to return certain equipment, automated e-mails are sent monthly to that individual, as well as to the quartermaster and the officer's supervisor, until the equipment is returned. "With a better picture of where equipment is, the department is ordering less equipment," Pearson notes, adding that the city of Richardson is now interested in expanding the RFID asset-tracking system's use to other agencies as well.
