The new service will see G4S Police Support Services – part of G4S Care and Justice Services – providing participating police forces with outsourced custody suites.
Those suites will be overseen by police custody sergeants but staffed by G4S’ highly-trained officer teams.
As a result, this will see a reduction in the number of police officers needed to process individuals who’ve been arrested and detained. The move will enable the return of hundreds of police officers to beat policing.
G4S teams will now complete paperwork, undertake finger printing and photography and manage the welfare of prisoners in the cells.
Scalable with a modular construction
The new custody suites will be scalable with a modular construction, enabling police services to lease a set number of cells within the G4S facility and for additional cells to be added if and when required.
These suites may be used to either replace police facilities – by way of a full outsourcing agreement – or supplement existing detention facilities within a given police service’s estate.
Importantly, these suites will be owned and operated by G4S, thus taking the significant ongoing costs of maintaining these buildings out of the public sector budget.
G4S Police Support Services is hoping to sign its first contract with a police service at the end of November to develop custody suites that will replace existing facilities, while G4S is also in discussions with a number of other police services regarding outsourcing their custody estates.
In addition to saving police services money, G4S has designed the custody suites to boost detainee welfare and offer cutting-edge security.
HD CCTV monitoring as standard
Unlike many existing public sector facilities, all corridors to detention cells are straight in order to ensure a constant line of sight from the custody desk.
Continuous HD CCTV monitoring is enabled in each cell to ensure detainee safety, although toilet facilities are pixelated to comply with privacy and civil liberty concerns.
All facilities will be regularly audited to ensure they comply with PACE and current Data Protection legislation.
G4S is also developing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to monitor vulnerable detainees’ well-being while in custody so as to maximise their safety.
If a detainee suffers a health issue while in their cell, an alert will be sent to the charge desk along with an audible alarm to notify officers and onsite medical personnel that an emergency has arisen.
Cutting red tape for the police
Commenting on the new initiative, John Shaw (the managing director of Police Support Services within G4S Care and Justice Services) said: “These revolutionary custody suites will deliver significant cost savings for the public sector and cut red tape for police officers, enabling them to return to the beat on a much faster basis.”
Shaw went on to state: “Police services can release aging custody estates where these are no longer required, and instead use the G4S custody suites as a secure hub, with more flexible office spaces located within communities to provide working space for officers.”
In conclusion, Shaw told SMT Online: “We believe this new service has significant benefits for police services, and will also allow forces to update aging custody suites with new state-of-the-art facilities at a more reasonable cost. With the custody suites owned, managed and maintained by a third party, police services adopting this solution will no longer bear the cost of deprecating detention estates.”
The G4S custody suites will have medical staff available 24/7 to further improve processing times and detainee welfare. Currently, it can take up to an hour for a qualified medical physician to attend a custody suite – a situation which has obvious health and risk implications for detainees.
On-site offices for duty solicitors
There will also be on-site offices for duty solicitors, with G4S investing in the development of electronic translation services. It’s envisaged these will use voice-to-text and text-to-voice translation systems along with visual imagery to help people communicate their needs.
Detention officers will be able to meaningfully interact with detained persons, while the systems provided will also generate an electronic written record of each interaction for subsequent auditing purposes.
The custody facilities are to be equipped with technology to enable video link-ups with the courts as it’s anticipated cases conducted via this method will become more widespread in the future.
The average G4S custody suite will comprise 30 cells, though the innovative modular construction will allow this number to be increased rapidly to a maximum of 50 containment units.
National average detention times
Currently, the national average detention time in custody is 6.5 hours. G4S states that its facilities will deliver comparable or improved detention times.
G4S Care and Justice Services employs over 8,000 people to deliver a wide range of services to central and local Government bodies and their agencies, regulatory bodies, UK police services and customers in the private sector.
Its range of services includes: adult and youth custody and rehabilitation, childrens’ services, court services, inter-prison transportation, electronic monitoring, immigration detention and escorting and police support services.
For further information on the work of G4S Care and Justice Services take a look at the company website (a dedicated link is provided on the right hand panel of this page)
