CUBA'S - techlife magazine

pEOpLE
the 12 police agencies participating in the Alberta C.O.P.S. recruiting
campaign will soon have a promotional video and an iPhone
application in their marketing toolboxes, thanks to NAIT students.
Over the past three years, post-secondary students have
competed to develop the Alberta C.O.P.S. (Career Opportunities in
Police Services) campaign, funded by Alberta Solicitor General and
Public Security to attract young people to policing.
The 60-second video (see screen captures above) was created in
fall 2010 by Digital Media and IT students. Five groups pitched their
ideas to the team from Alberta C.O.P.S. The entire class then produced
the winning concept, Train Hard, Work Harder, which combats
perceptions about policing as a dangerous career and shows how
training prepares officers for typical calls including helping a child with
a bike helmet and making an arrest.
Second-year student Cory Brake, the commercial’s digital imaging
technician and lead editor, says it taught him that “a film set is a huge
collaborative effort and every job depends on somebody else’s.”
The video will be posted to the Alberta C.O.P.S. website and can be
used by partner agencies.
The iPhone app, meanwhile, was developed by four students who
completed the project outside class, teaching themselves everything they
needed to know. “I just learned another course without having to pay for
it,” says Srikanth Sethuraman (Computer Systems Technology ’10).
The soon-to-be launched app provides recruiting information and
serves as a personal fitness training tool.
38 techlifemag.ca
Alberta C.O.p.S.
will take recruiting
mobile when this
iphone app launches.
no. name
the poLice fiLes
ROSalIe uRBan
business Intelligence
analyst
business Intelligence
Project office
Computer systems
technology ’81
rosalie urban was attracted to a career with Edmonton
Police Service in 1983 by the opportunity to work with data
that has an impact. “It’s real data that affects the citizens of
Edmonton. It’s crime data. It’s dispatch data,” she says.
That’s even more true today.
As technology has evolved, so too has the importance of
her line of work. “They (police officers) can’t do policing on
their own. They need the data. They need timely information.”
Urban, who joined the Business Intelligence Project Office
in 2005, extracts data from the records management system
and the computer-aided dispatch system (where 911 calls
come in) to produce reports. She was part of the team that
looked at how to capture information in a way that would
improve police response times to Priority One calls. “It’s not
just how fast you drive,” she says. And when Edmonton Police
Service added a fifth division in 2006, Urban helped provide
the data that informed the new geographic deployment model.
Although Urban, 51, has been able to retrain through work
to keep up-to-date, “keeping up with technology and being
efficient in using all of the tools to their proper capabilities”
has been the greatest challenge. After all, a lot has changed
since her student days, when Urban used punch cards and an
off-campus government computer the students had access to
(there was no computer lab on campus – “there were no such
things as PCs or laptops,” says Urban).
photos by jason ness; illustration by trina koscielnuk
screen captures supplieD by cory brake, carmen bachez anD anDrew nelson