Police lobby for national data consolidation

A lack of concrete government investment in data consolidation, analytics technologies and public safety radiofrequency spectrum has driven police unions to intensify their campaign for cross-jurisdictional law enforcement support tools whose absence, they argue, is hindering the modernisation of policing in Australia.

The concerns were raised at an Adelaide press conference following government announcements around new counter-extremism programs. Despite supporting these programs, the Police Federation of Australia (PFA) noted that “legislation and counter-extremism efforts alone will not prevent acts of terrorism from occurring in this country” and outlined three “fundamental” technology-based investments that “have had wide support for many years yet are still on the drawing board”.

Those technologies — including a nationwide case management system to replace fragmented legacy tools used by various state police forces; an upgrade of the decades-old Australian Criminal Intelligence Database (ACID) and Australian Law Enforcement Intelligence Network (ALEIN); and a dedicated public safety broadband capability built on 20 MHz of radiofrequency spectrum — would streamline the exchange of information about offenders across jurisdictional boundaries but had been tied up in red tape despite numerous commitments to address them dating back to the 2007 federal election.

With little progress made eight years later, PFA CEO Mark Burgess told GTR that the organisation’s awareness campaign was designed to put pressure on the state police ministers and attorneys-general to put some real traction behind the transformation effort at the 5 November meeting of the Law, Crime and Community Safety Council (LCCSC).

“Everyone’s agreed on the answer, so let’s agree on how we’re going forward,” Burgess said, noting that the PFA represents “99 percent” of Australia’s police officers and that in conversations with them it had become “bleedingly obvious that there are three issues that someone needs to grab hold of, give a shake and get common sense to prevail”.

Although he conceded that “there are issues such as privacy and legislation across the states,” Burgess said, “none of it is insurmountable. The reality is that with current technology you rely so heavily on instantaneous data distribution. When you’re dealing with life and death scenarios, you would expect we would have the same technology.”

Recent federal government investments in law enforcement technology have focused on broader transformation that attracted $254.7m in Budget funding for projects such as the $18.5m allocated for facial recognition biometric technology and the $33.3m “trusted identity framework” earmarked in this year’s federal Budget.

With policing projects funded at the state level, however, funding the three key PFA initiatives — including a national case management system and the consolidation of ACID and ALEIN into a new National Criminal Intelligence System (NCIS) — has proved somewhat more complex.

The PFA’s solution is to pay for the massive integration effort through the proceeds of “unexplained wealth” seizures from criminal holdings — a position it will be promoting at the LCCSC meeting.

“A lot of this comes back to parochialism,” Burgess said, “but parochialism doesn’t cut it for the front-line cop who needs that information, which could be the difference between them being able to do their job and their safety. The council needs to show leadership to start to actually take this issue forward.”

The ongoing lack of an integrated investigations system has created opportunities for analytics providers such as Wynyard Group, a New Zealand provider of forensic investigation tools that has built a global law enforcement following picking out often hidden trends from masses of operational and investigative data.

Chronic distribution of key data sources meant that Wynyard’s tools were designed from the start to work with a range of data sources, CEO Craig Richardson told GTR.

“A lot of information exists about persons of interest, and more often than not the information exists that would lead you to believe they are a high-risk offender,” he explained, “but it’s usually spread across multiple agencies and old systems that are operational. Some crime networks work across states and take advantage of the lack of sharing of this data.”

Jurisdictional differences have forced Wynyard to build an extensive governance framework into its systems so individuals’ access to the crime data can be readily audited. Such issues would need to be addressed in any nationalised criminal database, adding to the complexity of the PFA’s call to action.

Surrounding any such consolidation effort are “laws, regulations and methods that have to be followed”, Richardson said, “and they’re different in different [jurisdictions]. “All of these agencies have the intent to do the right thing and a lot of them have a lot of this data, but pulling it together in such a way to help them all is not a trivial exercise.”

Yet data consolidation isn’t the only item on the PFA’s agenda: the organisation’s renewed calls for 20 MHz of dedicated radio spectrum confirmed that the Productivity Commission’s recent draft report into public safety mobile broadband — which recommended the government build new police broadband capabilities on top of commercial networks rather than building a separate dedicated network — had done little to resolve a long-running spectrum debate and settle restive advocates for mobile emergency services exclusivity.

The Productivity Commission’s final report on mobile broadband is due by year’s end, at which point Burgess hopes the PFA’s unified front will have finally convinced LCCSC members to commit to bringing various police forces into the 21st century. It will take time, he admitted, but such success would give police both the promise of better crime analytics and a reliable method of delivering those analytics to officers in the field via mobile broadband.

“It’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he said, “but unless someone starts the process, it’s not going to happen at all.”

Image courtesy r2hos under CC