The Bichard Report into failures that led to Ian Huntley
being in a position to murder schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly
Wells, has pushed the need for a national police intelligence
network to the top of the political agenda.
After years of wavering and false starts the Home Office has
committed itself to rolling out an interim intelligence system
across England and Wales by spring 2005 and to starting work on a
fully-fledged intelligence sharing system.
A national intelligence system is needed as a matter of urgency,
but police forces in England and Wales are lagging years behind
Scottish forces, which began work on creating a national
intelligence system four years ago.
The Scottish Intelligence Database (Sid), built at a cost of £11m,
covers six of Scotland's police forces, representing about 17,000
officers and 7,000 civilians. It will be extended to cover all
eight forces by the end of the year.
The Home Office and successive home secretaries were heavily
criticised by Bichard for failing to take the lead in developing an
intelligence system for the whole of the UK. Plans for such a
system were, in fact, laid down in the National Strategy for Police
Information Systems in 1994, but they were dropped in 2000, just as
police chiefs were agreeing a National Intelligence Model designed
to place intelligence at the heart of policing.
The Police IT Organisation (Pito) is confident that the Bichard
inquiry has created a new political momentum for establishing a
national intelligence system that will sweep away the indecision of
the past.
"Bichard gives us clarity about what we need to achieve in business
terms," said Chris Earnshaw, Pito chairman. "We are working closely
with the Home Office and police forces in England, Wales and
Scotland. We are looking to provide a framework of interoperability
[with existing police systems] so that we do not re-invent the
wheel."
Challenges
But the technical and political challenge facing Pito is immense.
Creating a national intelligence system will mean integrating a
patchwork of intelligence systems across 43 police forces. They
range from highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art free-text
retrieval databases to computerised card indexes. Each force stores
intelligence in different ways and in different formats.
Persuading the forces to agree common data standards may be equally
difficult. Pito has no power to compel forces to adopt particular
technologies. Each chief constable acts independently and is free
to set his or her own priorities.
John Burbeck, head of criminal justice for the Association of Chief
Police Officers (Acpo), highlighted the scale of the task the
government faces to link police and criminal justice systems, at a
meeting of IT directors and MPs in parliament last week.
"To misquote the old saying, if I were going to start with police
IT and integrate it, I would not want to start here, I would want
to start over," he said.
Lessons
The English and Welsh forces could have much to learn from the
British Transport Police, which has implemented a system to share
intelligence among 2,250 transport police officers across the
country and with police forces. It uses free text retrieval to
search intelligence, crime reports and witness statements, whatever
format they have been stored in. British Transport Police is
sharing intelligence with seven forces, with more expected to
follow.
Many interested parties are questioning why the system already in
use in Scotland cannot be rolled out to the rest of the UK.
Although Pito has yet to flesh out its plans for a national
intelligence system for England and Wales, the early indications
are that it favours developing a separate system.
Dubbed Intelligence Management Prioritisation Analysis
Co-ordination and Tasking (Impact), the system will build on
existing projects, which are also in their early stages.
They include the Cross Regional Information Sharing Project
(Crisp), under way at Northumbria and Dyfed Powis police. This will
allow the forces to share data through a web browser without having
to replace legacy computer systems.
Stop gap
As a stop gap, Pito plans to roll out PLX, a system designed to
flag up when forces have intelligence about individuals that may be
of interest to other forces, by the end of 2005, 13 years after a
similar system was introduced in Scotland.
Jim Brookes, consultant for Socitm and former head of information
strategy at Avon and Somerset police, is among those who believe
Pito could be making an expensive mistake. He tried to get Acpo,
Pito and the Home Office to follow the Scottish path some years
ago. Brookes felt that the Scottish system could be used to link
forces together in regional hubs.
"Pito and Acpo were already working on their own systems and they
did not see the value of changing them. There was a 'not invented
here' syndrome. There were some genuine concerns about
interoperability but a regional-based system, in my view, would
have worked," he told Computer Weekly.
Andy Gosling, deputy project manager for Sid at the Scottish Police
Information Strategy, is understandably reluctant to get involved
in the politics. But he said there was nothing technically to
prevent Sid being scaled up for England and Wales.
"We do not have any doubt that it could be scaled to a UK national
system. It is quite basic in its overheads. It is a web-based
system. All the processing is done at the centre and pages are
pulled down from a central database. It is no more difficult than
logging on to the internet," he said.
Pito said last week that the real issue is that Sid cannot easily
interface with the legacy systems used by forces in England and
Wales - a claim disputed by ABN, the company that developed the
system.
Pito plans to begin a feasibility study of its alternative
solution, Impact, this year but it is unlikely to be ready before
2007. A lot is riding on Pito making the right decision.
Scottish system: blueprint for UK?
The
roll-out of a national intelligence system to all eight police
forces in Scotland will be completed by the end of the year. The
systems has already gone live in six forces
Development work on the Scottish Intelligence Database (Sid) began
four years ago when the Association of Chief Police Officers for
Scotland concluded there was no real alternative to sharing
intelligence data across the country. The Scottish police forces
agreed a common model for recording intelligence and defined an
agreed specification for the system, which took four years to
develop.
Although early discussions focused on developing interfaces to link
with legacy systems, the forces decided to start again with a new
common intelligence system. ABM won the contract in 2001.
The system is based on an Oracle database running on Sun servers.
Data is held on two mirrored sites managed by the Scottish Criminal
Records Office.
Forces can access the central intelligence database from an
internet browser. Sid was developed at a cost of £11m, which
includes £5.8m for Scotland's criminal justice extranet.
Transport police pioneer data
sharing
British Transport Police began work on its
own intelligence sharing system, to allow its 2,250 police officers
to share intelligence data among 84 police stations across the UK,
in summer 2001.
The system, developed by Memex, went live by the end of the year
and provided senior officers with the first accurate picture of
crime trends, problem areas and the most troublesome
offenders.
The system has a powerful free text retrieval search capability
which has allowed the force to use it as a platform for sharing
intelligence with other forces, no matter what data formats they
use.
"We have entered into data-sharing agreements with seven forces. We
exchange 13 months' worth of data with the forces and take daily
updates," said detective inspector John McBride. "As long as the
force provides data in CSV or XML format we can search it.
"Where we have access to police geographical data, we can do one
key search on suspects and names. If we had a robbery at Slough and
the perpetrator had a gold tooth and a red puffer jacket, we can
search for people who match that in the Thames Valley," he
said.
Because the system is flexible, British Transport Police has been
able to add other data from witness statements, which contain a
wealth of information, to the database and is in the process of
adding crime reports and command and control information.