NICE News Special Edition - Volume 2, Issue 2

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ST. GALLEN: SWISS CITY STEEPED IN HISTORY BECOMES MODERN-DAY FIRST

A Swiss city steeped in history, St. Gallen has evolved to become the main metropolitan center of eastern Switzerland. Centuries ago, St. Gallen was the heart of the industrial revolution for the Swiss textile industry. Today, it's home to a quiet revolution of a different sort, thanks to new technology from NICE. St. Gallen's City police, also known as the Stadtpolizei St. Gallen, is the first public safety entity outside of North America to employ a fully-integrated NICE solution for capturing and analyzing command and control center communications and associated caller details and incident numbers.

A bustling city renowned for tourism and textiles, St. Gallen is home to around 70,000 inhabitants. Ensuring security and law and order within the boundaries of the 2,026 kilometer City is the job of the St. Gallen City police. With a contingent of 210 police officers and administrative personnel, the department operates an around-the-clock command and control center, manned by seventeen dispatchers who work in shifts of three. The center is the first point of contact for St. Gallen residents who dial 1-1-7 (the three-digit emergency number for police). About 140,000 calls come into the center each year, including a large number of non-emergency calls, and some fire and ambulance calls as well. "In Switzerland we have separate numbers for fire and ambulance," said Urs Schürpf, IT manager for the Stadtpolizei St. Gallen. "But sometimes people get confused and they'll dial 1-1-7. We escalate and transfer those calls to the appropriate agency."

In December of last year, the St. Gallen City police implemented a new system from NICE to capture those thousands upon thousands of calls and associated dispatch and radio communications. According to Schürpf, the new solution replaced a digital audio tape-based system that had reached its end of life. "We had difficulty obtaining spare parts and the system was limited in its capabilities," he said.

Coincident with an overhaul of the St. Gallen center, Schürpf set out to acquire the new recording system, and he knew exactly what he wanted. "First and foremost, we needed something that would integrate seamlessly into our environment," he said. "That was a really big point for us. We wanted to take advantage of the infrastructure we had in place."

Schürpf was already using a SAN (Storage Area Network) with Sun Solaris servers for the City's mass storage requirements, and he wanted to leverage that mechanism for the center's voice and data recordings as well. His new NICE system does exactly that, saving everything in duplicate on the SAN and on LTO (Line-Tape-Open technology). "It allows us to back up our recordings and keep them for a longer period of time," he said.

After consulting with NICE Systems' Udo Riederle, a presales manager in NICE's public safety division, Schürpf soon discovered that leveraging the Sun Solaris was the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of NICE's ability to integrate into his IT infrastructure. NICE was able to architect a solution that not only recorded voice, but also worked with St. Gallen's Rola Security Systems AG PELIX server (the center's main command and control system) to capture data along with the calls. Key among this data was the caller's ANI (phone number), ALI (location), and name; the time and date of the call; and an incident number generated by the Rola PELIX system. Also referred to by Schürpf as a "business case number," this unique number consisted of digits representing the year and month the incident took place, as well as the case number. For example, "2006 02 4608" would represent case number 4608 that occurred in February 2006.

The integrated NICE solution, the first of its kind outside of North America, has transformed this Swiss city steeped in history into a modern-day first and has already proven beneficial. "With our old system, it was very difficult to find specific recordings," Schürpf elaborated. "Before, a citizen might have phoned us and said 'I called between 2 o'clock and 4 o'clock in the afternoon.' It might have taken us two or three hours to locate the recording. Now it's very fast. We can search by the location or the name of the person who called, or by the incident number."

The robust search capabilities coupled with vast on-line storage (the comm. center now keeps up to two year's of calls on-line) have saved St. Gallen an enormous amount of time. "Before, if we wanted to research and replay recordings, we'd have to go to the server room and load tapes into our old machine," explained Schürpf. "Now it's very easy. I can sit in my office and access recordings right over the network."

He also says that recordings can be easily reproduced for court. "With our old system, we had to rerecord using a standard tape recorder. Now we can make a .wav file of the complete incident, save it on a CD or load it on a laptop, and bring it to court."

Moreover, capturing data from the Rola PELIX gives St. Gallen insight that it didn't have before. Schürpf or any of his colleagues can recreate an entire incident from their center's captured voice communications simply by typing in an incident number and using Scenario Replay^TM, a NICE software application, to reconstruct and replay the phone and radio calls associated with the incident.

With the addition of a reporting package, St. Gallen will also be able to glean information that it can use to improve its operations. "Reporting was always a problem," said Schürpf. "Now we'll have a powerful tool to report on the calls we're taking, the number of calls we handle from specific geographic areas, and so on."

Also, the PELIX server stores the call data (e.g., the ANI and the ALI) temporarily, but that same data can be captured on a longer-term, historical basis in the NICE system, along with the voice recordings. "It's really a brilliant solution," noted NICE's Riederle, who has been around the public safety industry for close to a decade. "It's the first time we've implemented something like this in Europe. Having the incident call data along with the voice is an absolute strength because that information isn't captured anywhere else."

Riederle says that NICE plans to adapt this solution for other command and control systems to extend this capability to more public safety operations throughout Europe.
He's also working with Schürpf and representatives from Rola to further enhance the capabilities of St. Gallen's integrated recording solution to capture messaging data. Riederle explains: "If there's an emergency or catastrophe that requires a blanket response by police, the Stadtpolizei command center will page all of the units in the field to alert them," he said. The pager messages come through the PELIX server as text data and, as such, can be captured by the NICE system. "Recording this information will add another dimension to make St. Gallen's scenario reconstruction more accurate and complete," said Riederle, "and that's a capability that no other system can provide."

The Stadtpolizei St. Gallen's NICE solution includes NICE's Last Message Replay^TM software (giving dispatchers one-click access to all recorded emergency calls and radio calls right from their desktops) and is the only system currently capable of recording four interfaces (ISDN Basic Rate D-channel decoding, E1, analog and Siemens Upoe) in a single "box." To learn more about St. Gallen's one-of-a-kind solution from NICE email Udo Riederle at udo.riederle@nice.com.

You can learn more about the St. Galen police by visiting www.staposg.ch.