North Wales Police
North Wales Police is responsible for providing Policing within North Wales. This is split into 3 main territorial areas, Western, Central and Eastern. The Force has over 2600 employees, 1588 of these are Police Officers, 1010 are Police Support staff, which are spread out over the whole of the Force area providing 24 hour 365 day cover.
Prior to installing our first FotoStation back in 1998, all negatives were stored in individual job envelopes in rows and rows of filing cabinets. There was no easy access to photographs and when ever additional prints were required the negatives had to be retrieved, reprinted and then filed again.
During 1998 the Force introduced its first e-mail system which allowed us the possibility of sending small images via email to officers. We found that we were scanning the same images over and over again and so looked for a system that would run on a single networked computer and allow us to find the images again. We came across FotoStation which allowed us to do this, when we purchased a full film scanner. It was exactly what we were looking for. Over time we purchased Index Manager and a couple more FotoStations to allow all staff in the imaging unit access to the images.
During 2001 North Wales Police also purchased FotoWeb to allow all crime scene investigators access to their images. A proper server solution was purchased in 2004, along with Color Factory to automate the imaging work flow from scanning on the minilab to adding Meta data from different databases.
The Imaging Unit and Chemical Treatments department use FotoStation to input images to the system and by making the system available Force wide over the Intranet via FotoWeb all staff have access to it, with different access levels to images depending on the Job. These Officers are based all over North Wales and are also able to access the system anywhere in the United Kingdom if they have a North Wales Police issued computer and suitable Force access.
The Imaging unit does over 90% of the image input via FotoStation and also all the printing that is required.
Other specialist units use FotoWeb to view and preview images and where necessary add text to each image. All other staff have the ability to view and preview images that they have access to.
We have created links between FotoWare and Locard, our Force Forensic Management system. FotoWare is used as a Force wide image store with other smaller systems also interfacing with it.
We now have a system that is available 365 days a year, which means that Police Officers can view images they need to see at anytime. This has solved the problem of having to print images and send them around the Force only to find they weren’t needed, reducing costs and providing a more efficient service.
One of the benefits of using FotoWeb is that you can control who has access to what images and then there is a full audit trail of who has looked at what image which wasn’t available before.
Over the last 10 years the workload in the Imaging unit has gone up from just under 4000 films a year to nearly 11000 with the same number of staff. Having access to over 1 million images instantly has also speeded up the service that we can provide our customers.
FotoWare has allowed the Imaging Unit to provide a high quality imaging service throughout the Force whilst maintaining the integrity of the images. By using the system we have also been able to deal with the increases in workloads without additional human resources.
Back to references