The Forensics21 Programme will be facilitating the event primarily to inform stakeholders within the Fingerprint community on recent changes in the governance structure of fingerprints in England and Wales, but also to provide an update on the progress and benefits of recent portfolio work that has been undertaken on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). Input to the workshop will be provided by other relevant units within the NPIA, namely the Forensic Centre at Harperley Hall and the IDENT team.
Invites have been sent to Scientific Support Managers, Heads of Fingerprint Bureaux and in-force Business Change Representatives, which has generated attendance from the vast majority of police forces.
To supplement the event, Forensics21 have also launched a POLKA community.
For those of you who are not aware, POLKA is the "Police On-Line Knowledge Area" and in its simplest terms is like a secure social networking site for the UK police service.
In each community there are areas to hold documentation, photographs and images, event details, blogs, walls.... and also areas to discuss relevant topics.
As practitioners have not been invited to the event due to cost and space, the NPIA think that it is a good idea to get involvement from the front line by inviting fingerprint experts, fingerprint officers, laboratory staff etc. to join the community and participate in discussions.
Current discussion areas on the site are:
- National Fingerprint Training
Print to Mark searching from Custody
Laboratory Quality Standards
Digital Imaging Standards
Competency Based Training
Paperless Office
IDENT1 Collaboration
Tenprint Identification
Peer Review
Fingerprint Governance
Cognitive Bias
To access POLKA enter https://polka.pnn.police.uk/ into the web address of your internet browser, from a computer which is connected to the Police National Network (pnn), and follow the registration instructions.
For our international friends who will not have access to the site, I will endeavour to look out for nuggets of interesting posts and re-post them here (with the original posters permission) to see whether you good people will have any different views on the topics.
Please feel free to contact me for any further information