NSW police buys $6m Unisys digital imagery weapon

The system will manage and protect approximately one million digital images taken annually by forensic teams and images and video footage received from the public. 

It is designed to allow the Police Force to protect images as evidence while streamlining the process of managing, sharing and accessing them to save time in criminal investigations.

The contract is worth about $6 million.

"We are investing in the future of the NSW Police Force by providing officers with the necessary resources to do their job effectively using modern, smart policing strategies," said Detective Superintendent Ken Hughes, commander of the Operational Information Agency, NSW Police Force. 

"Moving to a digital-based imagery management system will save critical time in the law enforcement process. 

"Officers can check the quality of their photography before leaving crime scenes, with no need to process and print photographic film. In addition, they will be able quickly search, retrieve and distribute filed images."

Det Supt Hughes said NSW Police Force is Australia's largest police organisation covering a population of seven million people across more than 800,000 square kilometres.

It is the first police force in Australia to implement a digital imagery system of this scale.

He said time efficiency is critical and digital imagery is pervasive in society - from cameras in mobile phones to closed circuit TV cameras so it receives a large volume of imagery from the public. 

Allen Koehn, managing partner, Public Sector, Unisys APAC said the initiative reflects a common trend in law enforcement organisations in recognising the role technology can play to provide tools to help law enforcement and crime prevention.

"Our knowledge of the importance of imagery used as evidence has been fundamental to the design of the Unisys solution, which is based on a combination of our security, technology and applications expertise, as well as the insight of the Unisys team which includes professionals who have worked as law enforcement officers," he said.

The solution will run on eight Unisys ES3240L and 24 Unisys ES3215L Enterprise Servers.

It will also feature FotoWare, from Pivotal Business Technology, as the enterprise-class digital asset management software used in the heart of SIMS. 

Unisys has also partnered with EMC to provide the storage capability including EMC Centera for the digital vault and EMC CLARiiON for the storage supporting the work system.