Thanks to Bluestar’s commitment to quality products and customer service, we have won a number of tenders to provide national solutions to the UK police forces. Bluestar’s Corvus platform provides the extensible and resilient architecture needed to provide these solutions.
The National Footwear Reference Collection (NFRC)
The NFRC provides an agreed standard of coding footwear patterns across all forces in the UK. This then allows intelligence to be shared between forces and expertise developed in one force is transferable to another. The collection is now one of the biggest police owned collections in the world and is updated on a daily basis. The software provides easy and quick access to a vast collection of images and other reference information regarding footwear that the police have come into contact with. The solution has proved very successful with forces adapting their business practices to accommodate the NFRC.
The National Footwear Database (NFD)
Based on the success of the NFRC, Bluestar was commissioned to build the National Footwear Database. The NFD builds on the NFRC to record custody and crime scene marks where they are linked to footwear. These are then used by force intelligence units to try and draw links between crime scenes and people brought into custody. The NFD supports a number of advanced search options to allow all marks to be made useful even if they can’t be coded to a specific footwear pattern. A range of mapping, extract and document options are provided to make extracting intelligence and providing it to front line officers easier than ever.
Tools are also provided to allow forces to connect their source systems to the NFD so that data is seamlessly transferred from their existing internal systems. There can be as little as a one minute delay from data being entered on the source, until its searchable on the NFD. The NFD has proven so successful there are now around 30 forces sending data automatically from their internal systems. Additionally 5 forces choose to record data by hand out of the 43 England and Wales forces.
The National Injuries Database (NID)
The National Injuries Database (NID) is a specialised unit which does analysis on the injuries sustained by crime victims. Their advanced techniques allow crime scenes to be linked together and offenders tracked across all the forces that operate in the UK. Bluestar is pleased to be able to provide the NID with the software solutions they need to record their case work and perfom detailed searches of their intelligence repository. The NID has a requirement to store a large number of high definition images, Bluestar provides this function along with searching the data that is formally recorded along with the content of each and every document attached to every case.
National Extracts
Bluestar provides a number of data extracts for our customers. Each extract is customised to reflect the differing business rules that are presented in each force while conforming to the national standard. Bluestar is happy to develop extracts ranging from customised reports for small projects with very precise requirements, up to the massive multi-million record extracts. We have no problems providing data the PND (Police National Database) and the iPLX (Interim Police Local Exchange).
Bluestar Provides
- Technology powering the National Footwear Reference Collection
- Intelligence and recording functions of the National Footwear Database
- Software used by the National Injuries Database
- Extracts from a number of forces for the PND (Police National Database)
- Extracts from a number of forces for the iPLX (Interim Police Local Exchange)