Police get extra back-up by linking systems

Two police forces have linked their systems to allow them to share intelligence and provide disaster recovery back-up.

The government is piloting a national intelligence database called Impact which is expected to go live across all forces in the country by 2007. But until then police IT departments will continue to work independently of each other.

This means that forces around the country will use different incident reporting software to their neighbouring forces, making it hard for them to share data.

If the Sussex system runs into difficulties, the applications run in Gloucestershire almost immediately, which means officers don't have to fall back on pen and paper in the event of an outage.

But Sussex Police has found a way of working with Gloucestershire Police, which does have the same systems in place.

John Downard, IT system support manager at Sussex Police, explained: "We get 700,000 incidents a year that we record on our command control system. In 1988 we didn't have a way of sharing data - not much has changed since then but Impact will make us do that.

"We have a very unique arrangement - we and Gloucestershire use the same application platform for command control."

Data from the control centre - where calls are received and CCTV is monitored - can be saved on servers in either Sussex or Gloucestershire, he said.

If the Sussex system runs into difficulties, the applications run in Gloucestershire almost immediately, which means officers don't have to fall back on pen and paper in the event of an outage.

"We've got a good relationship with them, where we both provide disaster contingency to allow information to be exchanged. The key requirement was predominantly data recovery and keeping the kit running," Downard told silicon.com.

The IT department had been using servers made by Stratus for a number of years but bought the vendor's Datawise product for the back-up service.

Downard said: "In an outage we can click a button and be working on their system. There is no easy way to integrate that data back into our system, nevertheless, it's useful."

"Without the system people would go back to using paper. The need to get information on the ground is important. If [someone] makes a 999 call, if the system is not running you have to rely on all sorts of things to make this work," he added.

As with many public sector projects, Downard said the return on investment was hard to calculate: "It's a difficult one to quantify. Our citizens want to see police out on the streets so we have to give them the tools they need. We will be able to demonstrate real benefits from this."

Downard said the next step is to start looking at what the Impact project will mean for the force and data sharing: "We're now looking at the implications of Impact and working with colleagues in Hampshire and Kent to see how we will share information."