I do a lot of work with police forces, and sometimes this can take me to difficult, yet profound and ultimately highly rewarding places.
There aren’t many people who aren’t privy to the Soham murders involving the killing of two ten-year-old girls Cambridgeshire in August 2002. It was a crime that shocked the nation, not least by the very fact that the convicted killer was a local school caretaker, Ian Huntley.
What made this case even more grim was that following Huntley’s conviction, it was revealed that he had been investigated in the past for sexual offences and burglary, yet had still been allowed to work in a school. No conviction had resulted from any of these investigations.
As a result of these failings, the Home Secretary David Blunkett ordered an inquiry chaired by Sir Michael Bichard. The Bichard Inquiry highlighted major flaws 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 Huntley’s fateful slip through the net to become a school caretaker.
And so, the IMPACT Programme was born. This was set up to deliver a national system to support police intelligence and secure the future of the Police National Computer that met the Bichard report’s recommendations. The programme also had to deliver basic information sharing via the PLX System in the Criminal Records Bureau to all forces in England and Wales.
The problem was that these records were based on paper, so they had to be scanned in – quickly, accurately and with the highest assurance of security.
The main challenge was not just capturing the large numbers of paper-based records and converting them to electronic format, but implementing them quickly. In building up its databases, the individual Forces scattered all over the UK needed to integrate historical data from a number of sources and to supply the same data in a CRB friendly format. By and large, the necessary resources weren’t available in-house, so Preview Services was contacted with a view to providing an outsourced service.
During 2005 and 2006 Preview securely catalogued, digitised and indexed material for 7 UK Forces representing several million images. Deemed a success, Preview then set about working on additional projects in this sector from 2007 onwards.
Preview collected the entire source records which were digitally scanned and indexed over a five week period. A total of more than 10,000 records were scanned and the resulting images were indexed on 5 levels including the offender’s name and date of birth and the victim’s name and date of birth.
Owing to the success of the initial exercise, it’s great that we were asked to scan a further 10,000+ files of extra data to add to the CATS database.
In order to implement databased policing initiatives, what’s key here is the scanning and indexing of existing paper-based records. It’s fantastic that Preview is now in the enviable position of offering a range of outsourced scanning, archiving & document management services to assist the UK police forces in rapidly implementing such initiatives.
So perhaps now we can arguably assert that what we do can be a matter of life and death.
Karen James Preview Services
