Civica Digital, a division within the Civica Group that provides end-to-end digital solutions, has partnered with the Department for Transport (DfT) to enhance its cloud-based Collision Reporting and Sharing system (CRaSH).
CRaSH enables police officers to capture and upload collision data from the roadside in real time. This delivers dramatic time savings for police officers and helps improve road safety by providing a more accurate view of when and where incidents occur. CRaSH is currently used by 20 police forces in England and Wales and has already delivered savings in the region of £7.5 million per year for the agencies that rely on the system – with the new enhancements expected to deliver further incident report savings.
The latest version is a cloud-based system available to police forces in England and Wales via the DfT. CRaSH is used by the police to record and manage road traffic collisions and the application will also share statistical collision data with Highways England, DfT, police and local authorities, helping them work together to make safety improvements to the road network.
The new CRaSH mobile application will aid faster, more accurate roadside reporting for police officers. The app uses Ordnance Survey mapping and captures valuable metadata – such as time and geographical location – to provide a clearer picture of where road collisions occur and why. By improving the quality of data captured, CRaSH highlights collision hotspots across the road network and informs more effective spending on road network improvements, ultimately helping to save lives.
CRaSH also streamlines the end-to-end case management of a collision, using automation and integration with third-party systems to minimise the need for manual intervention and reduce the risk of errors. CRaSH has already reduced the time taken to produce reports on road collisions and this is certain to fall even further as the new version of CRaSH is rolled out across forces. The platform also offers secure, resilient hosting in the Microsoft Azure cloud and new functionality for police officers to move easily from a paper-based process to efficient digital incident reporting for third parties, such as insurers.
Road Safety Minister, Jesse Norman, said: “This technology ensures police officers can record accurate information about crashes – ensuring they spend less time on paperwork and more time preventing crime. This data will also help local authorities identify issues and act more quickly to improve road safety.”
Steve Thorn, Executive Director, Civica Digital, added: “CRaSH allows police forces to go fully digital for road traffic collision management – a key step forward in intelligence-based policing, enabling agencies to talk to one another and collaborate to tackle road issues and improve road safety. With improved efficiency and end-to-end transformation, we’re confident that a digitally transformed and mobile CRaSH will lead to more efficient use of finite resources and far better decision making about the road network in the future.”
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