Remote-controlled drone

Police use remote-controlled drone to spy on crowd at V festival - 2007
Police used a remote-controlled spy drone to monitor crowds at last weekend's V festival. The first time the technology has been used at a major public event.

Bristling with sensors, cameras and even infra-red night vision the 70cm-wide flying robot was used by police to keep an eye on suspicious-looking revellers at this year's music festival.

The drone, which has been dubbed "The Spy In The Sky", was used to gather intelligence on individuals and to monitor the car parks at Weston Park to catch people breaking into vehicles.

The battery-operated drone, so it cannot be heard 50 metres up in the air, which resembles a helicopter, is fitted with high-resolution still and colour video cameras and infrared night vision capability.

Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History)

‘Minority Report’ technology used by police to predict crimes

Software that can predict when and where future violent crimes will be committed is being used in Britain for the first time.

The system, known as Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates crime records, intelligence briefings, offender profiles and even weather reports, to identify potential flashpoints where a crime is most likely to occur.

By collecting all the data existing in the police, this software will do predictions with data past and present so that it can produce a report can predict crime.

These data are not only based on the type of crime and the location of the incident but also based on results of time such as hours and certain days.

a key factor behind a 31 per cent fall in crime and 15 per cent drop in violent crime in Memphis, Tennessee, according to The Observer.

 “This is more of a proactive tool than reacting after crimes have occurred. This pretty much puts officers in the area at the time that the crimes are being committed.”

The software has been developed by IBM which has invested $11 billion in analytics over the past four years.

Mark Cleverley, the company’s head of government strategy, said: “What the technology does is what police officers have always done, sometimes purely on instinct – looking for patterns to work out what is likely to happen next.'

Incident handling computers

All Police forces have incident handling computers; which are normally mini computers. All 999 calls are logged onto these. In the Operations room, the controllers must know where each police car is. Computers track all police vehicles. Each vehicle has an encoder mounted on the dashboard which is a microprocessor. It has a number of buttons on it. The police will press these buttons to show

• What they are doing
• Where they are.

When a 999 call is received the controller can search for all police cars in the area excluding ones involved in certain duties. The best car can then be chosen and instructions are sent by radio control to that car.

Airports

Airport metal detectors are electronic instruments for identifying different types of metal objects. Terrorism, hijacking, and bombings have lead to the installation of airport metal detectors for security reasons. Walk over or hand held models of metal detectors are normally used in airports. Airport metal detectors ensure that no weapons or smuggled goods are brought to the airport premises or into the aircraft.





X-Ray radiation penetrates different materials at various rates. The X-Ray machine sees the variations in that density. They see everything that's in your bag. They also pick up on metal and drugs.

These images are then shown onto a screen for sercurity at an airport to see what items people have in their bags and if they are dangerous they will be taken aside.

Databases

Before the use of ICT police would store information about everybody in a paper base system. The problem with this though is that only one person could access a piece of data at any one time and if a piece of data was lost, damaged or destroyed due to a fire or flood, data would be lost forever and would need to be recollected. Also filling cabinets which stored this information took up a lot of room and it could take hours to find one piece of information about a person or crime. Lastly if something needed to be changed about a person the documents would need to be re written which was extremely time consuming.

Now through databases records can be searched through easier using queries, computers do not take up at much room as filling cabinets, data can shared over a network and a back up can be taken onto a memory stick, magnetic tape or CD and stored somewhere else in case of a flood or fire. It is also a lot easier to change a piece of information if it is on a computerised system.

The criminal conviction database includes the following fields

• Name (the one the criminal is known by)

• Real name

• Height

• Approx. weight

• Colour of eyes

• Colour of hair

• Glasses

• Tattoos

• Scars

• Warning signals e.g. do they usually carry firearms

• Previous convictions

• Method of crime