Police video ID parades go national

A Linux-based system which creates video identity parades for police forces is to be the core of a national video identity system.

The Video Identity Parade Electronically Recorded (Viper) system was developed by West Yorkshire Police.

Participating police forces expect to save more than £7m this year.

Plans are now being developed to link it to other identification systems such as DNA, digital fingerprints, facial and iris recognition, held in different databases, with the information accessible by police on the move.

"[Viper] is stand-alone but identity isn't," Tony King, National Viper Bureau project manager, told vnunet.com.

"The National Video Identification System [NVIS] is the next level up. It is looking at the architecture of identity to feed a national database."

One task for NVIS will be to make ID information available online to a mobile workforce.

But wider issues, such as restricting access to sensitive information and whether to include information other than video footage on non-suspects, will need to be resolved.

Last year changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act allowed police to use video-based parades.

Viper's 1.4TB national database now has over 9,200 15-second video images. So far 58 police sites have imaging units and King indicated that he had orders for 20 more.

Some 700 people have undergone the four-hour selection and imaging training.

The service is being used for about 80 parades a day, seven days a week, and 15,000 video ID parades have been conducted since its inception.

Police consider successful ID parades to be the most effective tool in securing a conviction.

But a single ID parade can cost up to £1,250 and take six to 10 weeks to set up depending on the availability of 'look-a-likes', witnesses and suspects.

A Viper parade of about 10 downloaded video images costs as little as £150 and removes most constraints on availability.

A service level agreement requires that a parade is prepared and delivered in two hours. For urgent cases, this can be reduced to an hour and the fastest recorded is 15 minutes.

This immediacy has the added bonus that witnesses are more likely to provide accurate identification while the incidents are fresh in their minds.

King said that the original system, which runs on IBM xSeries Linux processors and 'Intellistations' for video editing, plus software and services from Sagitta, cost about £1.3m.