Humberside Police is introducing software to standardise and cleanse its crime information to meet data sharing requirements.

The force is preparing to make its records available as part of the Cross Regional Information Sharing Project (Crisp), the second stage of the Impact intelligence-sharing programme developed after the 2004 Bichard Inquiry into the Soham murders.

Crisp requires all 43 police forces in England and Wales to allow access to each other’s systems by March 2007. Humberside is installing Informatica’s Data Quality system to ensure its data is of a sufficient standard.

‘We had our information in a number of different systems,’ said Graham Dawson, head of information services at Humberside. ‘We needed to make sure the information we supplied to the national police system was of good quality and could be used by other forces.’

Butler Group analyst Sarah Burnett says Humberside must implement data input standards to ensure information remains coherent. ‘You have to make sure people who put data in do it consistently,’ she said.