By Carole Gunst
The West Yorkshire Police department is the UK's fourth largest, serving approximately 2.1 million people living across 780 square miles. The police force is comprised of more than 5,000 officers and 2,300 support staff. Among them are the department's imaging unit, one of its largest and most advanced, which focuses on developing video imaging technology that helps bring criminals to justice.
In April 2002, the West Yorkshire Police launched the VIPER (Video Identification Parade Electronically Recorded) system as a component in the battle to reduce street crime, in response to the British Home Office's street crime reduction initiative. The Home Office tasked 10 UK police forces with aggressively reducing the rise in crime to meet set targets. At the same time, a change in the Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) gave those police departments an important new fast-response crime fighting tool: video-based police lineups instead of live lineups.
Video lineups reduced the cost of assembling a lineup and helped police identify suspects quicker. Before electronic lineups were introduced, a live lineup cost between $1,500 to $2,500, and often took six to ten weeks to set up. A lineup now costs as little as $270 and happens within two hours. That is the limit set out in the VIPER Bureau's service level agreement (SLA) with its 31 police force customers. For urgent cases, VIPER can produce a lineup within an hour. Some have been produced in as little as 15 minutes. The West Yorkshire Police Department engaged US-based consultancy GlassHouse Technologies to help build the high-performance VIPER infrastructure by making the best possible use of the department's existing IT assets. The result is a crime-fighting system that has attracted attention from police deparments around the world.
How the VIPER System Works
VIPER Bureau police departments use the system to record digital clips of suspects and match them against a database of volunteers to select eight to 10 candidates for a lineup. They edit the video clips together into a digital lineup and show them to witnesses on a standard television or a laptop at a remote site.
System performance is key to VIPER's success. Dealing with such large numbers of video image files, each starting at 25Mb, presents technical challenges such as the limited speed that users are able to access the files and the ability of multiple editors to access files at the same time. The West Yorkshire Police partnered with GlassHouse to develop, implement and maintain a high performance scalable solution.
Along with 18,000 electronic line ups in three years came a lot of data and video files that threatened the VIPER system's scalability across its 100 remote sites. To accommodate the data load, GlassHouse helped the VIPER Bureau design and build a storage and backup solution for the new disaster recovery site, which will ensure VIPER is available 24x7. The next step is an outsourcing storage and backup support contract to support the entire VIPER production and disaster recovery environments.
Key elements of the GlassHouse Operational Support Services (OSS) family ensure that the force's backup and recovery systems are running efficiently. These services include remote monitoring from the GlassHouse Service Operations Center (SOC), which saves West Yorkshire Police the cost of hiring in-house support staff. GlassHouse helps the West Yorkshire Police anticipate future needs with storage and backup capacity planning. GlassHouse's change management processes ensure that changes to the infrastructure comply with the customer's standard operating procedures, and that hardware and software compatibility is not compromised during upgrades.
The VIPER Bureau has dramatically reduced the time needed to assemble a lineup, which increases the number of lineups they can run. VIPER Bureau police forces have run more than 18,000 VIPER ID lineups to date. This is far more than they could have done using live ID parades and saved more than $65 million in VIPER's first three years in operation. The bureau is carrying out 240 lineups a day which equates to 3,700 per month and the vast majority are processed in under two hours with as many as 12 percent turned around in under an hour.
National police forces across the world know about its efficiencies. Police forces in Australia, New Zealand and the US have visited the West Yorkshire Police to see VIPER at work, and several of them are considering VIPER-like systems of their own.
Carole Gunst is Marketing Director at GlassHouse Technologies in Framingham, Mass.
