BOBBIES in North Yorkshire will have their movements tracked by computer technology in a bid to make the force more efficient.

The new "business intelligence" software will be used to track the activities of North Yorkshire's 1,600 police officers while they are at work. The system is expected to help managers to decide when and where to deploy resources.

Managers expect the monitoring software to go live across the force by the end of this year.

An initial trial, which started in February, was monitored in one of the force's two control centres. It meant managers could redeploy officers to suit the times and places when they were most needed.

Detective Superintendent Ken McIntosh, who runs the force's control centre, will shortly begin to extend the use of the "Qlikview business intelligence application" to analyse the patterns of activity of all beat officers during their shifts.

He said: "We do not think we are as efficient as we can be, and providing a better service to the public is one of the areas where we see ourselves improving."

All officers will soon be asked to enter a status code every time they begin a new activity during their shifts.

That data will then be transferred to the force's command and control system and used to decide how officers can be best used.

North Yorkshire Police has so far moved two members of staff who had been employed to take calls to other duties since the technology was first implemented in the command and control centre in early February.

Officers in the control centre have already established a routine of updating the system with details of their activities throughout their shifts.

Det Supt McIntosh said that by analysing this data he was able identify inefficiencies and the system had also helped managers in charge of the contact centre to know when and where extra resources were required.

He added: "The process has been revealing, since all the supervisors in the control room were telling me that they had a lack of resources, while Qlikview was able to highlight where there was slack."

The control room implementation has also helped North Yorkshire Police comply with three sets of regulations for handling calls from the public about crime - the National Standard For Incident Recording, the National Crime Recording Standard and the National Call Handling Standards.

Mark Botham, chairman of the North Yorkshire branch of the Police Federation, said the new system was an extension of technology which was already in existence in the force's vehicles and could be used to help officers get to incidents.