Police try to allay fears over mobile scheme

THE NATIONAL POLICING IMPROVEMENT AGENCY (NPIA) has tried to allay fears raised by its system for identifying stolen mobiles in seconds and has revealed plans for a fast-track DNA matching system.

The INQUIRER spoke with a spokesperson for the NPIA about the reasons for the move. We asked how reliable it is, how it will affect privacy, if there have been any compromises made, and what other technological advances are being made in the police force.

"We want the police service to have a much quicker process for enabling officers on the beat to directly access the National Mobile Phone Register," the spokesperson told us. "It sends a clear message to thieves that police can identify stolen mobile phones very quickly. This improvement will help police officers to provide a better service to the public and recover more of their stolen and lost mobile phones.

"Previously, front line officers had to go through their control room to request a search on the National Mobile Phone Register which could take up to 20 minutes to determine whether a mobile phone had been stolen."

In regards to how reliable the Register and Police National Computer (PNC) are, he said they are "very reliable". In terms of the PNC, he highlighted the fact that it "exceeded its availability target to police forces and criminal justice organisations", with a target of 99.5 per cent availability and an actual achievement rate of 99.86 per cent.

The issue of privacy was one that was raised before and the NPIA was keen to dismiss such fears, but we asked for more clarity on this aspect. "No personal data is kept on the National Mobile Phone Register," the spokesperson said. "Phones will be identified by their unique IMEI number, which identifies a specific mobile phone being used on a mobile network, and NOT by individual ownership details. To find out details of who had their phone stolen or lost, police will need to get the crime reference number from the Register and do a check on police crime recording systems."

The INQUIRER asked if the efforts to make access to information faster had led to compromises. "No compromises have been made. The aim is to enable front line officers to obtain instantaneous results of searches on suspected stolen mobile phones," the spokesperson said.

We also wanted to know what other technological advances are being made in the police force and discovered that the NPIA is "supporting the development of a technological solution that will allow a numeric DNA profile to be matched against the National DNA Database within an hour or less.This will enable police to quickly match forensic evidence found at crime scenes with profiles from the National DNA Database."

The spokesperson said that the aim of the "fast-track DNA matching" is to more quickly identify suspects in order to prevent them from committing further crimes or to eliminate them from police inquiries. He said that currently it takes "a few days" to get a matching report.

The NPIA spokesperson said the way it will work will be as follows. A DNA sample taken from a crime scene will be converted into a numeric DNA profile. The numeric DNA profile will be sent electronically to the National DNA Database, where it will be loaded and checked against other numeric profiles on the database. Then a match report detailing whether it has matched any other profiles on the DNA database will be sent to the police force investigating the crime. µ