Every emergency call into the largest police jurisdiction in the world has to survive as evidence - and be findable years later. Two recorders and six copies of everything.
Western Australia Police polices the largest single police jurisdiction in the world: 2.5 million square kilometres, served by more than 150 police stations. Every 000 emergency call and 131 444 assistance call for that whole area lands in two rooms in Perth, the Police Operations Centre and the Police Assistance Centre.
The Issue
The two centres take more than a million calls a year between them. Any one of them may later be needed as evidence, or to confirm a time, a duration or who was on the line. Every call has to be recorded, archived to a strict retention standard and found again quickly when it is requested.
The Solution
CallTech installed and supports two Red Box recorders running in parallel at the WA Police Communications Centre. Both capture the Ericsson (Aastra) digital handsets in the Police Operations Centre and the Police Assistance Centre, so no call depends on a single machine.
Calls are written to each recorder’s disk immediately, then archived permanently to DVD and to Network Attached Storage. That gives at least six separate copies of every recording, which is what the retention requirements demand.
The recorders also receive call data from Ericsson Solidus eCare over the local network. Call origin, call type and the operator who took the call are written into each recording’s annotation fields automatically, so staff can locate a call without knowing exactly when it happened.
Every call into both centres is captured and archived to evidentiary standard, and any recording can be found by call origin, call type or the operator who took it.