East Midlands forces to launch first fully-digital fingerprint system
Three forces in the East Midlands will be the first in England and Wales to digitise all fingerprint records.
Three forces in the East Midlands will be the first in England and Wales to digitise all fingerprint records.
Derbyshire Constabulary, Lincolnshire Police and Nottinghamshire Police, which collaborated to form East Midlands Special Operations Units Forensic Services (EMSOU-FS) in 2012, will update all their paper records over the coming weeks.
More than half a million documents dating back to 1999, when fingerprint records were transferred from a central store in London to each individual force, will be given to specialist police IT provider Northgate Public Services, where they will be scanned, catalogued and stored in encrypted files on EMSOU-FS secure servers. The paper records will then be destroyed.
The files include 15,000 records identified for destruction by the Home Office under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (POFA), which says no fingerprints taken from a person who was not prosecuted or acquitted of a minor offence can be held by police forces after January 31 next year. These records will be tagged and deleted from the digital system by Northgate.
Digitising the fingerprinting records will also allow the forces to compare their information with other data on the Socrates forensic case management solution, which is run by Northgate and used by 36 UK forces.
EMSOU-FS updating is also being monitored by the Association of Chief Police Officers, which if successful could become a standard system for other forces looking to computerise their systems.
Ian Gledhill, head of the EMSOU-FS Regional Identification Bureau, claimed the collaboration with Northgate would make significant financial savings and use up less officer hours in retrieving information.
He said: We now have the imaging and print quality to satisfy the requirements of the courts, making the need to hold paper records obsolete. This process will effectively make our bureau paperless.
He added that if the process was replicated nationally, it would offer a database of millions of instantly-accessible fingerprint records.