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One Way Ticket

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DQI Bureau
New Update

One group that is

benefiting from IT and translating that benefit into higher service for its constituents

is that of the state and federal organizations throughout the world that ensure law

enforcement. These groups are using information technology to track trends in various

crimes and to help identify and locate the perpetrators. Like many organizations, the

Metropolitan Police (Met), in London, have used database technology, specifically

CA’s Ingres, to store the names of criminals and the circumstances surrounding their

offences and share this information among its branches in order to prevent and solve

future crimes.

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One of the most fundamental

aspects of the Met’s duties is to arrest and detain suspects until they can be proven

innocent or guilty. Upon being charged of a recordable offence, all suspects are

photographed and fingerprinted within the custody suite. Traditionally, this process has

involved ‘wet camera’ (film-based) technology. Traditional film-based cameras,

however, do not allow police photographers to preview pictures as they are taken. The 35

mm color film must be sent to a lab where it takes up to seven days to process. If the

pictures returned are unusable, the Met will have no current picture for the suspect,

which could result in damage to the investigation.

Even if usable pictures are

returned, the Met faces the problem of duplication as the colour images lose detail, as

they are photocopies. To further this problem, the Met has no efficient way of

transferring these photographs between Units, because of the inefficiency in handling

photographs that is inherent to relational and hybrid-relational databases. The difficulty

of providing access to these photographs from a traditional database also makes it very

difficult to know who has requested suspect photographs, resulting in some cases of

unauthorized usage and further damage to the investigation.

"Digital cameras were

definitely needed as they provide instant previews and the images can be loaded directly

onto a PC," says Inspector Bagshaw of the Metropolitan Police.

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Jasmine cracks the case

The Met realized that these

problems would only get worse. They began to search for a solution that would provide a

fast and deficient way to capture suspect photographs and make them available to all units

instantaneously. The first part of the solution was to provide instant photographs

previews, but what image standard should be chosen? A number of digital cameras were

tested along with digital capture of live video. The prototype system stored the images in

a simple flat field database that the Met knew would not be suitable for roll out

throughout the service.

Following an intranet proof of concept

exercise that demonstrated Jasmine, the Met’s Department of Technology realized that

it would meet their needs. As a result, traditional database solutions were not even

considered. The Met decided

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cided that Jasmine was a

solution because of its pure object storage, its ability to analyze multimedia data and

the fact that its pure object architecture enables developers to closely model real-world

conditions. The product’s ability to integrate digital camera equipment and its

ability to support dynamic Internet applications were also factors in the decision.

"The lengthy and

error-prone system which was used to record suspect images and information was a continual

headache for



the Met," says Inspector Martin Bagshaw of the Metropolitan Police. "Sometimes
we were unable to use any of the photos because of camera error, which resulted in gaps in

our suspect history files, and storing all of our suspect information in paper files was

logistical nightmare. Law enforcement moves too fast to have to deal with traditional film

development times and paper filing methods."

Jasmine’s integrated

development environment was used to create a web-based digital image capture system for

use in the Met’s Custody Suites. Jasmine Studio is a graphical development

environment providing simple and powerful drag-and-drop facilities that enable the

creation of client/server or internet applications.

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With the new system

officers working in the Custody Suite take a series of up to nine photographs of each

suspect using a Polaroid PDC2000 camera connected to a PC. The suspect is also

fingerprinted at this time. Instead of having to compile a board with the suspects name on

it, as with the previous system, operational officers are able to simply key the

suspect’s information into the Jasmine Studio application via PC, greatly benefiting

the officer as suspects are often restless when in the Custody Suite. Once photographs are

selected, the images and the accompanying text are replicated to a Jasmine database on the

Central Image Server across the network. Within seconds the suspect data is live and can

be viewed by Met officers via the web throughout London.

Jasmine enables the Met to

classify users into groups, each with varying degrees of access to the Central Image

Server. Using a web-based application developed with HTML, and supported by Jasmine,

operational officers can perform searches and view, but not print, photographs. Divisional

Intelligence users, using the HTML interface, are able to perform the same functions as

the operational officers, but in addition, are authorized to update the database. Database

access is controlled with user names and passwords. In addition, the system tracks which

officers have accessed the system, which images they viewed, and any updates that were

made.

"The new system has

greatly improved the quality of our data and the resources that are available to our

officers," says Inspector Bagshaw. "We can move suspects through the Custody

Suite much faster, and have their information available to all officers in minutes where

it used to take days. As a result we have had greater success in tracking trends across

districts."

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Evidence of future plans

The Met is continuing its

Jasmine development with plans for an intranet-enabled solution that will enable the

organization to populate its Witness Album Display System (WADS). WADS is used to show

witnesses, through laptop computers, images of selected convicted persons. In the future

these images will be directly downloaded to the laptop from the central image server

rather than by scanning them in by hand. The Met plans to use Jasmine Studio to develop

this application. In a short time, the Met has been able to take the management of suspect

images from an antiquated paper-based format into the next century. Jasmine provides a

pure object solution that is necessary to successfully create a solution of this kind.

 

Courtesy:

Computer Associates

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