Policing - new material (72)
01 May 2005
Retire, who me? Brian Mackenzie. Police Review (Jane's Police Product Review supplement) 15.4.05. p. 23. Article on the Ex-Police in Industry and Commerce (EPIC) organisation which "was set up in 1980 by a small group of officers who were working in the security industry." Members of EPIC "must have worked for either a Home Office or Scottish force, or the Police Service of Northern Ireland or the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. They must also work in the private security field after having completed at least 25 years service." The group is "involved in just about every imaginable aspect of security and investigations in the private security sector, including biometrics, child-protection screening and counterterrorism".
France: the search for justice. The effective impunity of law enforcement officers in cases of shootings, deaths in custody or torture and ill-treatment. Amnesty International, 2005, pp. 29. This Amnesty report considers "the way in which the criminal justice system in France has failed to provide victims of human rights violations with the right to redress and to obtain reparations." The report notes that "Almost the entirety of cases which have come to Amnesty International's attention have involved persons of non-European ethnic origin and are often of North African or sub-Saharan extraction, or from France's overseas departments or territories". It observes that "Racist police attitudes mean that certain people are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and ill-treatment" The report is available at:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGEUR210012005
Faces in the Frame. Police Review (Jane's Police Product Review supplement) 15.4.05. p. 23. This article discusses developments in facial identification technology, in particular the National Video Identification System (NVIS) and the Facial Images National Database (FIND), both of which were on show at the first Facial Identification Conference at Stratford upon Avon. FIND will create a national database of offender mugshots and in the longer term "as biotechnology develops, [it] will enable Automated Facial recognition from CCTV images." The FIND team is also looking at the US WINPHO system which "ties together nine databases of images and the equivalent of the DVLA driving license images into one system." The NVIS system "will enable the development of a fully operational, effective and integrated systems for video identification parades". The article also touches on the automated facial recognition system being trialed by West Yorkshire police - this system searches CCTV images against the force's mugshot database "of more than 85,000 individuals."