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Copenhagen police turn to Macs

The Danish Police Department is depending on Macs to manage the Environmental Conference in Copenhagen this week.

By Nicole Kobie, 7 Dec 2009 at 12:14

As the world descends on Copenhagen this week for the United Nations Climate Change conference, the city’s police must manage protests, secure world leaders, and handle all the other issues that come with a major global event.

Perhaps surprisingly, the force is doing it with Macs.

The Danish Police Department isn’t using Apple computers on the go, or keeping in touch with iPhones. No, the entire central command is now run by Mac Pros and Mac Minis, with not a single PC to be seen.

The Danish police force has been using Macs since 1996, running NeXTStep. But five years ago, the force needed to upgrade, as spare parts were becoming scarce.

It started looking around at what systems other countries were running, even touring the UK to find a setup that was innovative enough to catch the force's eye.

It didn't find one. Anywhere.

Karsten Højgaard, Police Inspector and the driving force behind the upgrade, told IT PRO: “We were looking at the leading [systems] on the European Market to see what they were able to do for us… we didn't like it and went back empty handed.”

Then, two years ago, with the United Nations Climate Change conference looming, a decision needed to be made. The force's previous supplier Frontline suggested creating a bespoke system using Macs.

The system

Running since mid-July, the new bespoke Mac-based system uses 25 Mac Pros and 73 Minis.
Copenhagen Police Mac Minis
The operations room features 14 workstations, with each hooked up to multiple large displays.

Because the system lets operators be more efficient, the Danish department uses a third fewer call takers than other forces in Europe. Shifts of six to eight people using 14 workstations are all the city of 1.2 million needs to take 800 to 1,200 emergency policing calls.

“When we were looking around [for a system] – we have been almost everywhere in the UK – we saw some problems with the speed of how they did things. It’s not very fast in the US either,” he said.

“We have compared them well, and they very much look alike,” Højgaard said.

“It takes a lot of human resources to… produce the same amount of call cards. We use eight people. In Kent and Surrey and Glasgow, they use 30, 40, 50,” he added.

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4 comments

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System Costs

While you could certainly get Shuttle PCs running Linux, or thin terms running Citrix for 50-65% of the price of the Mac Mini hardware, the key question is what the overall system costs are. This is the thing that always amazes me about enterprise IT - we end up spending 5-6 figures on software, and typically even more on having it customised or enhanced - costs that usually dwarf the desktop hardware costs. Yet the choice of desktop environment dictates - to a large degree - the cost of development. These days we waste huge amounts of time trying to do things that are easy in native code in browser apps - and often IE6 browser apps at that. (How long before even native Windows developers can safely start using some of the newer more productive Vista and Win7 APIs, rather than the decade old XP?)

By JulesLt on Tuesday Dec 8

Who makes these decisions?

So, when many enterprises are now looking at the benefits that FLOSS can bring them in terms of speed, flexibility, cost savings, and extensibility, The Danish Police Force is throwing out its proprietary Windows system in favour of an even more restrictive and proprietary Apple one. Even Apple aficionados that work in a proper server environment will tell you that an Apple server is just not up to the job. Who made this crazy decision? We are told that "Karsten Højgaard, Police Inspector and the driving force behind the upgrade, is responsible". Note "Police Inspector" not "IT Professional". Why does this not surprise me? Because most major IT decisions in the public sector are made by bureaucrats and others swayed by slick sales people.

By 6tricky9 on Tuesday Dec 8

Wow that's amazing...

...Macs used for something more than laying out pages or editing video, well who would of thought it possible! (sarcasm) You know, you had me, right up until the sentence "One major problem with Macs is their price", there was I suckered into thinking this was a positive piece about Macs from a non biased source in the trade press. Silly me. Once again, out come the same old stereo type comments; (whining voice) "Macs are expensive", "There's no software", They are a closed system", "they are serious computers" ad-nausium. Like it or not (and in some ways, even Apple doesn't like it), Macs are quite good at doing most things, they talk to everything, there's a plethora of software available for them (just not on the shelves of your local PC dealer) and they are really not that expensive considering the level of hardware they include. Apple's problem with pricing and the perception of the writer and that previous commentator, is that they refuse to make a truly low end (read 'crappy') machine. Look for example at the spec of the 'low end' Mac Mini, which for £500UK has 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory, 160GB hard drive, 8x double-layer DVD Writer, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics. Factor in the OS and applications bundle (which are all full featured apps not the nasty machine subsidising bundleware you get on Wintel PCs) and it is quite a reasonable package. The same is true right across the desktop range up to machines that cost a great amount of money but are no more expensive than a similarly specced HP or Dell workstation. OK, the laptops are expensive - that I'll give you, but they are truly beautiful and probably the best in their class, born out by the fact that several people I know who work at Microsoft in the UK say they are the best Windows laptops money can buy. So the Dutch police have discovered that their Mac network allows them to be more productive. That's great. Hopefully they will also see that on average the Macs last longer that PCs (average 5 years instead of 3 for Wintel), have little worries in the way of viruses and spyware (although they should still use AV of course - don't want any typhoid Mary's do we) and they will hopefully influence other organisations to look outside of wintel boxes again. Good on them. P.S. If you want to know just how bad the XServe is, ask Virgina Tech, who's XServe based supercomputer has over 1100 machines and was rated one of the fastest compute clusters in the world.

By ideasplace on Wednesday Dec 9

disgusting

that is certainly nothing to be proud of. for the company macintosh neither for it's users. <br> supporting an organ witch is used for repression and beating down people who want to use their right to advance thier oppinion is not the way a, as they say, different thinkin, company should go!<br> a modern and progressive idea of a firm and a technology don't fit to antiquated structure witch is based on rejection!<br> <br> an indignant mac-user

By iamshocked on Wednesday Dec 9