NPRS - National Police Reference System

The National Police Reference System co-ordinates national operational policing information services for a safer Australia. There are two major streams of activity:

• the first provides national operational policing information through maintaining existing police reference systems - the National Names Index (NNI), the National Vehicles of Interest (NVOI), the National Firearms Licence and Registration System (NFLRS) and the Telephone Directory System (TDS); and
• the second involves the development of new capabilities and the redevelopment and enhancement of the existing systems within an integrated national system delivered by CrimTrac.

The national fingerprint and DNA systems provided by CrimTrac are valuable tools that police and law enforcement officers need to do their jobs. NPRS joins these as a powerful new tool to be used by police and law enforcement officers in the fight against crime. In combination these systems provide officers with unprecedented access to the essential information they need in their dealings with persons of interest.

The new capabilities in the National Police Reference System (NPRS) will provide officers with rapid access to the up-to-date, consolidated, nation-wide information they need to in their policing duties. NPRS complements jurisdiction systems. Officers can make decisions equipped with knowledge recorded by their colleagues from across the nation. This is a powerful change that greatly improves an officer’s ability and confidence to respond to events and investigate them comprehensively.

When completed, NPRS will have positive impacts on:

• officer and public safety;
• custody management practice;
• developing suspect and offender profiles;
• warrant execution;
• bail determination;
• court brief preparation;
• criminal history checking;
• person and suspect identifications;
• unidentified body investigations;
• criminal investigations; and
• missing person investigations.

The benefits of NPRS will be improved community safety through increased efficiency and effectiveness of policing including:

• faster means for officers to retrieve information;
• faster identification of suspects for crimes;
• shortened crime investigation times;
• higher crime clearance rates;
• simplified information flows (many of these are manually intensive and time consuming);
• new collaborative work practices by providing a holistic nation-wide view of the information;
• greater cross-jurisdictional visibility and audit of who accesses what information, when, and for what purpose (this better informs police of activities relevant to their investigations and prevents misuse); and
• ability to deal with the increasing mobility of criminals and terrorists, and in particular to counter the increasing number of crimes exploiting inter-jurisdictional boundaries.

The Minimum Nationwide Person Profile project (MNPP) is the first new NPRS milestone, and started as a pilot system on 10 March 2005. The project provides users with a single national view of person information, even if this information has come from different sources. The pilot involved the exchange of detailed person data from NSW and VIC, with summary information only provided by other jurisdictions, and access granted to officers at particular pilot sites.  Significantly, during the pilot both NSW and VIC reported arrests, recaptures, identifications and operations that would not have been possible without the NPRS capability.

While the system development focused on New South Wales and Victoria, all jurisdictions were involved in the pilot evaluation. The evaluation report confirmed that this capability is highly suitable for proliferation across all jurisdictions and should be extended through further enhancements. 

This NPRS functionality is now being rolled out nationally.