A new infrastructure for sharing information about low-level crime and anti-social behaviour was launched at the BSIA conference-exhibition in Brighton on Wednesday, October 30. The system, by Littoralis Limited, is already in use in central London and the Brighton-based company hopes to extend it across the country over the next 12 months.
DISC Network allows local shopwatches, pubwatches and other business crime reduction partnerships to link into data-sharing groups to identify and monitor travelling offenders such as professional shoplifters and fraudsters. As the software firm says, it’s an aspect of criminal behaviour which is difficult – and costly – for police to address yet DISC Network is being deployed across the country at no cost to taxpayers or government.
The launch of DISC Network was announced at the BSIA’s South East England Regional Crime Conference at Brighton’s Amex Stadium by Littoralis director Charlie Newman, pictured. He said: “This is really an exciting day for us and for our DISC users throughout the UK. I truly believe that DISC Network will make a substantial contribution to reducing crime and anti-social behaviour nationwide.
“Our DISC system is used by more than 100 local crime reduction partnerships throughout the country and has helped them reduce business crime in their own localities. Now each of them can use DISC Network – completely free of charge – to keep tabs on semi-professional and professional crooks and fraudsters who keep a low profile largely by moving around the country, between police jurisdictions and exploiting the fact that there is little or no regional or national tracking system to monitor their activities.”
DISC Network allows existing DISC users to link into any kind of group: for example DISC users along a motorway can link together to exchange information on travelling shoplifters. Or in the same country or region, DISC users can likewise link up so that offenders identified in one town can’t simply move on to neighbouring ones and do their business as usual. In the capital, the Safer London Business Partnership has already created a DISC group covering a number of central-London partnerships which it administrates on behalf of local business groups.
DISC Network allows individual administrators of DISC systems to access ‘dataviews’ of offenders from all other participating DISC Administrators. Hundreds or thousands of mugshots can be filtered by gender, ethnicity and build to make it easy to identify individuals who are known to two or more of the participating Administrators and therefore might be ‘prolific’ or ‘Level Two’ offenders. By bringing all these mugshots together from a geographically wide area in this way, DISC Network means that travelling offenders can run – but they can no longer hide.
Newman says: “DISC Network assembles images of similar individuals so that Administrators can then more easily filter them not only by gender and so on but also by name and, visually, by appearance. We are also planning to implement a semi-automated facial recognition system along the lines already in use by some social networks sites such as Facebook. This will automatically sort images into groups of visually similar offenders – and then the human can do the rest.”
Charlie Newman stresses that DISC is completely compliant with the Data Protection Act and DISC Network is too. He says: “We are very careful to limit access to this data to the administrators of individual partnerships, who are well acquainted with the restrictions that the law demands on storing, processing and exchanging personal data. Between them our DISC administrators (who serve around 28,000 individuals businesses in their respective areas) can use the system to ensure that travelling offenders are more easily identified when they appear in their areas, and also can provide invaluable intelligence as well as substantial evidence for prosecution to their local police forces.
“The really great news for existing DISC Administrators is that the DISC Network is completely free to join. Any Partnership can share offender details with any other – as long as all agree of course, and that there is a clear and evident justification for doing so.” For more about DISC and DISC Network visit: www.littoralis.com
