Police Authority Case Study

The Bichard Inquiry that followed the Soham Murders highlighted deficiencies in police national and local intelligence systems, in particular the inconsistent record keeping and reporting standards among the 43 police forces in England & Wales that allowed Ian Huntley to slip through the net to become a school caretaker.

The IMPACT Programme was set up to deliver a national system to support police intelligence and secure the medium and long term future of the Police National Computer in line with the recommendations in the Bichard report. Also recommended by Sir Michael Bichard, the programme will deliver basic information sharing via the PLX System in the Criminal Records Bureau to all forces in England and Wales.

With the imperative of speeding up the implementation of such systems post-Bichard, it was clear that the main challenge would be capturing the large numbers of paper-based records and converting them to electronic format. In building up its data bases, the individual Forces needed to integrate historical data from a number of sources and to supply the same data in format acceptable to the Criminal Records Bureau. As the necessary resources were mostly not available in-house , Preview Services was contacted with regard to the provision of outsourced services.

In the years 2005 and 2006 Preview has securely catalogued, digitised and indexed material for 7 UK Forces representing several million images. In 2007 Preview has already been tasked with substantial additional projects in this sector and the Company’s staff have all been police vetted for the purpose.
“Child protection material is a highly sensitive area and outsourced suppliers are assessed on a number of criteria such as data protection, physical security, network security and so on. The force looked at several suppliers and chose Preview because it rated most highly on these factors overall,” said the Deputy Chief Inspector of one UK Force.

He went on to say: “Having established the CATS programme, the dual objective was to enhance our own internal systems and at the same time provide the required offender data to the Criminal Records Bureau.”

The source records were collected by Preview, digitally scanned and indexed over a five week period. In total, over 10,000 records were scanned and the resulting images indexed on 5 levels including offender’s name and date of birth and the victim’s name and date of birth.

As a good indicator of the success of the initial exercise, a further 10,000+ files of supplementary data has now been scanned and added to the CATS data base.

The scanning and indexing of existing paper based records is key to the timely implementation of data-based policing initiatives. Preview offers a range of outsourced scanning, archiving & document management services which can help UK police forces rapidly implement such initiatives.

Call Preview Services on 020 8755 5710 or complete an Information Request form