Police test records check on the beat

CJIT chief aims to expand use of Criminal Justice Exchange

Police officers on the beat could in the future directly check number plates or suspects’ details, rather than having to run requests through their local Command and Control centre.

The plan is one of the possible additional uses for the Criminal Justice Exchange that are being explored by Criminal Justice IT (CJIT) director general John Suffolk.

The Exchange is the core of the Joined-up Justice programme. It is a secure hub linking the separate agencies of the criminal justice system (CJS), including the police, courts, prison and probation services.

It allows the agencies to share information, and attaches to major data sources such as the Police National Computer (PNC) and number plate database.

The Exchange is already up and running and Suffolk is keen to consider further possible uses of the infrastructure. ‘The aim is to build once and then give to everyone,’ he told Computing in an exclusive interview.

Current checks against the PNC or DVLA vehicle database records rely on police officers telephoning Command and Control and asking them to run the check. The system takes both time and resources.

But proof of concept trials carried out by CJIT have shown that voice recognition software could be used to allow law enforcers to query the data directly.

‘I spend a lot of my time looking at the Exchange and asking what else we can do with it – such as police officers being able to use their secure radio to ‘talk’ to the data,’ said Suffolk.

‘We ran a mock test to see how such a system would handle stop and search. We showed it to some Met Police and they thought it was the bee’s knees,’ he said.

The trial was up and running using off-the-shelf products in only seven weeks, but it has not yet been tested at scale, so no firm plans are yet in place.

‘We can’t go to market on expectations we aren’t certain we can deliver, so we are waiting for some of the datacentre projects to come online so we can test this at scale,’ said Suffolk.