Technology and traffic cops

OK, so I admit it - I watched one of those traffic cops programmes on the tele last night.

I know - rubbish tele, but strangely compulsive. And shed loads of cool technology stuff. I'm more or less writing this down so that I don't forget it in case it comes in handy at any point...

What was interesting was the use of ANPR cameras in police cars - this was in Sussex fwiw. They automatically read oncoming number plates and can automatically interrogate the Police National Computer (the PNC) as well as the DVLA database and an Insurance Database (which may be the same thing as the DVLA one, I'm not sure). This gives a beep (and flashes a touchscreen button) if the vehicle doesn't have insurance or an MOT or is reported as stolen or needs to be found for some other reason.

Manually it's also possible to interrogate the databases to work out if a driver has a driving ban or a warrant outstanding on them and so on.

All of which was Quite Interesting.

Tattoo me...

On the news this morning - the potential use of infra-red digital photography to capture images of tattoos which might be useful in capturing villans.

There's a handy BBC article (Camera filter reveals tattoo clue) as a starting point and an article in the Derby Telegraph. That led me to the press release on the University of Derby's site:

"Identifying individuals using tattoos has been an established part of forensic science practice for some time, but there can be cover-ups of tattoos with lasers, more tattoos or surgery."

It is now possible to take a control photograph and a separate photograph with an infra-red filter to take images of the tattoo, and determine if it is indeed the original or is a cover-up, or altered tattoo on the surface.

Digital photography means that moments after the images have been taken, they can be viewed on a laptop or computer screen - making this interesting approach now more feasible for use in everyday forensic work, compared to more traditional processes."

David Bryson, quoted from link above

From there I got to the Forensic sciences faculty pages at Derby. Now I wonder if this has any other potentially useful ICT sorts of applications you might be able to use? I'm thinking we can get CSI, Spooks andWaking the Dead into this newsletter you know...

Then I got to David Bryson's bio on the Derby website and from there to his own site called Cladonia Resources which might possibly have something vaguely useful on it. It was quite interesting following the path to get there though... . A prize to the first person who can tell me (withoug using google) who or what Cladonia is. My money's on Mr Heald...

Ooh, really obscure cultural reference in the title to this post btw...

Spammers in the can

Well...

Police shut down 1,200 scam shopping websites anyway. So, I presume, the police need computer experts to help them with this sort of thing? Might fit Jan 10 content, at least as a bit of an aside perhaps.

The 1,219 websites purported to sell items ranging from Ugg boots and Tiffany & Co jewellery to GHD hair straighteners.

Well, that'll be all my pressies then...

Apparently the Met has a specialist e-crime unit - the PCeU (Police Central e-crime Unit). Might be worth looking and seeing if you can find anything about them (e2a: here's their website - use the left hand menu to find stuff). The Met also has a Fraud Alert! webpage which may have useful bits and bobs on it. Perhaps.

Interetsingly some regulatory organisations are name checked in the article as well - Consumer Direct, Trading Standards and the Office of Fair Trading. I guess these guys must use computer people as well.

Stars of CCTV - streamed on the web

Odd story.

There's a proposal to put CCTV streams live on the web as streaming video.

Yeah, so I could be viewing a stream and see someone I know doing something they shouldn't. Perhaps?

The proposal is that there would be a prize for the best "crime spotter" each month - £1000 I think.

Aside from all the civil liberties issues associated with this, there's some useful factoids about CCTV in the article and some evaluation of it's effectiveness (or not).

Police, legal and regultory organisations

Did some talking when I was in London yesterday to other teachers dealing with this stuff - as well as one of the chief examiner blokes for the specification. This is January 2010 content btw.

We came up with a few ideas.

The key point to remember is this is the caveat that the uses of ICT need to be ways "to combat threats to individuals and society". That actually takes out some possible uses.

Stuff that you might want to consider:

Police:

• HOLMES is an obvious one
• CCTV
• Number plate recognition -wiki page
  
• Speed cameras perhaps
• Facial recognition stuff (from biometric data - they started using this at airports last summer) - a lot of odd biometric stuff is covered in this Guardian article. This is the wikipedia page on Facial recognition systems. How Stuff Works also has a page on this.
  
• Things like swabs for explosive residue maybe?

Legal:

• Databases used by people like the probation service would, presumably, make it easier to track where people are and not to lose them
• Offender tags?
• Maybe stuff connected to courts?
• Law Technology News is almost certainly worth a look. You'll need to dig out the useful stuff, but there's probably something here if you're struggling for interesting legal stuff.
  

Regulatory:

• Certainly stuff like the Financial Services Authority is OK - the potential for insider trading, for example, could destabilise the financial system and therefore be a threat to society
• The DVLA maybe - although how you'd link this to a threat I'm less sure: perhaps through keeping a record of which cars have tax - are untaxed cars more likely to be driven by people who are a risk (e.g. disqualified or untrained?) and less likely to be uninsured, which pushes up everyone else's insurance? Tricky though.
• Maybe things like the TV licence people - but I'm not sure how this comes down to a threat.
• The Nuclear Inspectorate people

Ideas? Post a comment - use this as a place to share ideas. Perhaps?

Not forgetting that they can't be control systems.

Tweeting Police

Looks like the cops are now using Twitter (and maybe other stuff) to try to do the whole community policing thing in a more 21st Century sort of way.

There's a BBC article that explains all this and focuses on a jolly nice police person called Ed. He is not, as far as I am aware, a duck. Which is good.

"Posting a message on Twitter warning about a spate of burglaries in an area is a similar concept to pinning up a poster on the local parish council noticeboard."

"Doing either in isolation might be fine, but by doing both we can spread that warning even further."

Almost certainly useful for Jan10 exam.

And...

Greater Manchester police have been signing up users to get Facebook updates on crime in their area. More than 25,000 people seem to have signed up. Sign up! Get the updates!

Some of the links from these articles might be handy to take a look at as well.

Killer Instinct

Totally by chance I ran across an article which talks about the use of computers to catch criminal type people - a system called HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System - a strained acronym if ever I read one...).

I imagine there may be other references to it somewhere or other - bound to be as it sounds quite interesting. I've put a version of the article (OK, 3 screenshots stitched together...) on the school system, but the original article is available at http://www.open.ac.uk/hsc/pers/m.s.dowling/pics/d115418.pdf (warning: PDF file) - you'll want about page 36.

It is a long magazine and machines may have some problems loading/saving it as some of the fonts used are a bit odd. I certainly couldn't print the whole magazine, although I could print page 36.

The article itself - which is aimed at Open University students - is quite easy to read and access. I think the version I put on the school system even has the reference you'd want stuck on the bottom of it.

e2a: there's a quite useful page on HOLMES on wikipedia. The usual caveats about the reliability of wikipedia apply of course, but it strikes me as a reasonable starting point (I think somewhere on wiki there's an article about how to reference (or 'cite') a wiki page).

This led me to the HOLMES 2 site itself. The external links at the bottom of the wiki page led me to Law Technology News, which might be an interesting place to find some quite interesting things (perhaps).