Galicia's Costa da Morte is a patchwork of small coastal municipalities with small police forces. A typical headquarters in the area has between 6 and 15 officers and covers a scattered territory of dispersed rural settlements, with tourist peaks in summer. Coordinating work between neighbouring municipalities was always an operational problem: each had its own case files, its own fines system and its own annual report.
The problem nobody wanted to solve
Picture a common situation: a vehicle pursuit crosses the boundary between two municipalities. Police in A pass the information to B by radio, but the report is closed in B with no record of what happened in A. If the case later has to be reopened, the information is split across two different systems.
Or an even more frequent case: the same repeat-offending driver builds up fines in four different municipalities. Each headquarters processes its own fine without knowing that the driver already has three others. The supra-municipal picture is invisible.
The traditional answer was to ask the Provincial Council to centralise. But provincial councils have no operational powers over local police forces, only coordinating ones. Unification had to come from the bottom up, through a voluntary agreement between the six City Councils.
The model: a shared platform with local autonomy
Appolo was deployed in federated multi-tenant mode: a single technical instance, six logical tenants, each with its own data, its own users and its own access. The union is complete when you want to query, and separate when you don't.
Each headquarters retains full autonomy:
- Its own case files and its own numbering.
- Its own users and its own permissions.
- Its own duty rota and its own annual report.
- Its own indicators and its own reports to the Mayor's office.
What is shared voluntarily:
- Cross-checking of number plates. When an officer in A checks a number plate that has a record in B, they see B's information immediately.
- Coordination of special events. Pilgrimages, patron saint festivals and sporting events are planned jointly.
- Comparative statistics and supra-municipal benchmarks for those in charge.
The inter-administrative agreement
The technical deployment was quick (four weeks), but the agreement between the six City Councils took seven months. Each municipality had to approve the agreement in full council, with its legal report and budgetary implications.
The agreement had three critical points:
Cost sharing
A model proportional to the number of active officers in each headquarters was agreed. This avoided the small municipality paying the same as the large one, maintaining fairness without penalising whoever contributes most resources to the system.
Governance
A technical committee was set up with one representative from each headquarters plus a representative of the Provincial Council as an observer. This committee approves significant changes to the system (new modules, changes to cross-permissions, etc.).
Leaving the agreement
Any City Council can leave the agreement with six months' notice. On doing so, it receives a complete copy of its data in a standard, exportable format, with no penalty.
What changes operationally for an officer
For the officer on the street, the most visible change is the unified number plate and person lookup. When they stop a driver and check the number plate, they get the full picture: whether there are outstanding fines in any of the six municipalities, whether there are active search orders, whether previous incidents have been recorded. All the information on a single screen.
Identifying people works the same way: a cross-referenced municipal register across the six municipalities shows where a resident is registered without the need for phone calls to other City Councils.
For the head of each force, the most visible change is the supra-municipal dashboard: comparative statistics on types of fine, peak hours, hotspots and accidents. It allows operational decisions to be taken from a regional perspective, not just a municipal one.
First-year figures
| Indicator | Result |
|---|---|
| Monthly cross-queries | ~1.200 |
| Repeat-offending drivers identified (who previously went unnoticed) | 87 |
| Events coordinated jointly (pilgrimages, festivals) | 23 |
| Average time to process a case file | −35% |
| Unified annual report (previously 6 separate documents) | 1 document + 6 annexes |
Replicability of the model
This model is especially powerful in areas with many small municipalities and small police forces: Costa da Morte, Cabe-Sil, Sierra de Gredos, the Bierzo district, the Aragonese Pyrenees, the Alpujarras, rural La Mancha… Any territory where administrative fragmentation means that an officer effectively "patrols" several municipalities at once, even though institutionally they work for only one.
The main barrier is not technical but one of governance. The inter-administrative agreement is the real challenge, which is why we recommend that the first step should always be to bring the mayors and the heads of the police forces round a table to define what they want to share and what they don't. Once that is clear, the technical implementation is the easy part.
