The Police National Computer (PNC) is a computer system used extensively by law enforcement organisations across the United Kingdom. It went live in 1974 and now consists of several databases available 24 hours a day, giving access to information of national and local significance.
From October 2009, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) state that there are over 9.2 million nominal (personal) records, 52 million driver records, 55 million vehicle records and that 185 million transactions were made in the twelve months previous. Since 1 April 2007, it has been maintained by the NPIA which was inherited the activities of the now disbanded Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO). Prior to the establishment of PITO, the PNC was managed directly by the Home Office.
The PNC was started in 1974 with Stolen Vehicles as its initial database. Since then, additional applications have been implemented almost every year. The range of facilities, level of detail and potential value of information stored on the PNC has improved significantly. This has led to the PNC being more of an investigative tool rather than its original purpose of a record keeping one.
Read more about Police National Computer: Configuration, Users, Databases, Future
Famous quotes containing the words police, national and/or computer:
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)