Chief Executive Officer's Welcome
In its tenth year of operation, CrimTrac has cemented its role in enhancing community safety by providing law enforcement with the tools needed to combat crime.
The agency has initiated and overseen the national roll out of major information sharing solutions and advanced technologies to ensure police and law enforcement agencies are receiving critical data in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
National problems demand national solutions and for policing, it means CrimTrac must do everything it can to deliver timely and accurate information to Australia’s police officers, wherever they are across the country.
The importance of a national approach to law enforcement information sharing was reinforced in April 2009 when all Commissioners of Police joined the CrimTrac Board of Management providing a comprehensive national view of policing in Australia.
The success CrimTrac has already achieved is an excellent example of the Commonwealth, states and territories working together to harness technology to prevent, detect and reduce the incidence of crime in the community.
CrimTrac has moved from being an “IT Shop” to a facilitator of information sharing solutions across a broader landscape of law enforcement. This recent transformation and our hopes for the future have shaped our strategic plan for 2010–2015, CrimTrac 2015.
CrimTrac 2015 reflects an ambitious vision of leadership and innovation, while recognising the challenges the agency faces through the federated nature of law enforcement in Australia. It also recognises how far the agency has progressed.
One of our recent achievements includes the the implementation of an electronic National Police Checking Service Support System to replace a paper-based system for processing criminal history checks. The new technology will assist CrimTrac in managing the ever-increasing demand for criminal background checks, providing the capacity to process up to six million a year.
In 2009, we completed the national roll-out of the National Police Reference System (NPRS), an electronic information sharing capability specifically designed to equip operational police, anywhere in the country, with the knowledge they need to make on-the-spot decisions when dealing with persons of interest.
Another major milestone was reached when we achieved 100 per cent matching between all jurisdictions through the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database (NCIDD). Now the NCIDD is delivering to its full potential, I am confident that it will result in police matching more unknown DNA profiles left at crime scenes with people throughout Australia and assist in solving serious cases where there may be few other leads. NCIDD also has an important role to play in protecting the innocent, identifying unknown deceased, and locating missing persons.
We are in the process of implementing a new automated system to support our National Police Checking Service (NPCS) and manage the ever-increasing demand for criminal history background checks, providing CrimTrac with the capacity to process up to six million criminal background checks a year.
The agency has a significant menu of work ahead of it. Among the commitments includes developing and deploying a new, national child protection project: the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) to combat online paedophilia. The implementation of CETS software will enhance inter-jurisdictional efforts in child exploitation investigations by improving law enforcement opportunities to identify and rescue victims of child exploitation.
The project to address the abundance of child exploitation material was established in 2006 as a strategic response to an identified need for national law enforcement collaboration in child exploitation investigations. The new technology will interrogate, process, and isolate child exploitation material from seized digital storage devices.
We are also continuing the study into the feasibility of a national approach to case management after the National Counter-Terrorism Committee requested that CrimTrac identify the requirements of each police jurisdiction for a national investigations management system. The study involves exploring the viability of developing a common approach to sharing incident and event information to support: a national view of incidents; identification of links between incidents; and cross border investigations.
Data security and data integrity remain critical issues for us as an organisation and we have introduced the CrimTrac Audit Log Integration Facility (CALIF), a national auditing tool that documents and tracks the activity of users of CrimTrac systems. Recently, CALIF was commended by the Australian Privacy Commissioner when the facility was selected as a finalist for the Australian Privacy Awards 2009. The awards are designed to recognise and reward organisations for exemplary privacy practices.
CrimTrac’s priorities for the next five years, outlined in CrimTrac 2015, include exploring opportunities to work more closely with international law enforcement agencies and assessing the potential for collaborating and exchanging information across Australian borders. I look forward to progressing these priorities, as we continue to deliver against our guiding principles of “responsive,” “innovative” and “accountable”.
Ben McDevitt AM APM
Chief Executive Officer