NOW THEY ARE TAGGING POLICEMEN
Every Metropolitan police officer will be "tagged" so that senior officers can monitor their movements on a tracking system, it has been disclosed.
The plan - which affects all 31,000 serving officers in Britain's largest police force, including the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair - will augment the Airwave radio system used to help monitor officers' movements, the magazine Police Review reported.
The electronic tracking device, called the Automated Personal Location System (APLS), means that officers will never be out of range of supervising officers.
According to the service provider Telent, the technology "will enable operations centres to identify the location of each officer at any time they are on duty, whether overground or underground". Although police chiefs say the technology is aimed at "improving officer safety" and reacting to incidents more quickly, many rank and file believe it is simply a Big Brother-style system to keep tabs on them.
Some officers are concerned that the system - which will be able to pinpoint any officer to within a few feet of their location - will end community policing and leave officers purely at the beck and call of control room staff.
One officer, in Peckham, south London, said: "They are keeping the exact workings of the system very hush-hush at the moment although it will be similar to the way criminals are electronically tagged. There will not be any choice about wearing one."
Neither the Met nor Telent would provide Police Review with more information about how the system will operate.
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13/04/08 @ 09:53