HANDHELD COMPUTERS (6 jJune)

NATIONAL POLICE MUG-SHOT DATA BASE

The police are developing the first national database of mugshots so that they can use face recognition technology to match CCTV images with details of offenders, MPs have been told.

The system is being developed in a pilot scheme involving the Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Merseyside police which has generated a database of more than 750,000 facial images over the past 18 months. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA), told MPs yesterday that the development of a national facial images database is just one element of a technological revolution in neighbourhood beat policing.

His hi-tech vision of the future of policing was given during the final evidence session of a year-long inquiry by the Commons home affairs select committee into the "surveillance society".

The development of an electronic mugshot database is still at an early stage. In the pilot scheme areas the digital photographs are logged of everyone who has been arrested for a criminal offence, with the image linked to the criminal data held on the police national computer. While each force is able to search the electronic mugshots in its own area to match them with CCTV images, the technology does not yet exist to search on the scale needed for a national database.

The NPIA said the database would allow forces around the country to search for, retrieve, store and transmit facial images or video images with scars, marks and tattoos if appropriate. The idea is that each force will store its images on a central national database to give all forces immediate access to the mugshots for intelligence and investigative purposes.

So far only three police forces have been involved in contributing and viewing images, but several other forces, including Greater Manchester, North Wales, parts of the Metropolitan, and the immigration police have been given "read-only" access. So far £6m has been allocated on developing the technology with a national launch date of 2009 pencilled in.

NPIA evidence to the committee raises the prospect of "automated face recognition" to identify known offenders or terror suspects. But Neyroud said trials around the world had shown that there was still a long way to go before such systems could be used reliably.

The police are also developing "behavourial matching" software to pick out odd behaviour in a crowd using CCTV picures. "That might be particularly useful in counter-terrorism or tackling street crime," he said. "The proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK - with about one for every 14 people - means that we are now accustomed to our movements being monitored in this way and for most people this is not an issue."

The Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, told the committee that people's fears over a "surveillance society" were the "meat of myths". He said that the regulatory oversight of surveillance was far more robust than many assumed. "The idea of big brother or big sister sitting on everybody's shoulder makes great copy for the newspapers but it is simply not the case."

The devices have allowed officers to carry out fingerprint identity checks by the side of the road, saving time that would have been spent in taking people to the police station – and also potentially saving some people the inconvenience of being arrested while they have their identity checked. Generally, an officer who is not satisfied with the identity of someone who has committed an offence would arrest them and take them to a suitably equipped custody suite in order that relevant checks can be made. The mobile fingerprinting devices enable officers to do this at the roadside, thereby avoiding unnecessary arrests and police officer time in spent at the police station rather than on the street.

Since the trial began, officers have used the mobile fingerprinting device 477 times. Each time it is used it has saved an average of 1hr 23 minutes in police time - a total of almost 364 police hours across the year. Mobile fingerprinting has also allowed Road Crime Unit officers to identify 300 people who may not otherwise have been identified and to make 74 arrests. The trial has been managed nationally by PITO, the Police IT Organisation, and was intended to complement Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, which allows vehicle number plates to be cross checked against a number of databases to identify vehicles that are of interest to the police.

Sergeant Pete Gill of the Northamptonshire Police Road Crime Unit said that the mobile fingerprinting technology had proved to be a very useful tool. "Being able to quickly establish someone’s identity means that fewer criminals can evade justice and reduces the time police officers are having to spend away from the frontline at police stations.  "Taking someone into a police station to take their fingerprints can take some considerable time. With this technology, we can achieve the same result in just two minutes by the side of the road."

Fingerprints are only taken from people who are suspected to have committed offences and those who are suspected to have given false details or whose identity is otherwise unknown. It does not mean that all motorists stopped by police will now be fingerprinted.

The Lantern device works by electronically scanning the subject’s index fingers, which are sent using encrypted wireless transmissions to the central fingerprint database. A real-time search against the national fingerprint collection of 6.5 million prints is then performed. Any possible matches are identified and returned to an officer in a target time of less than five minutes.