A national police IT system has been widely criticised claiming that it hinders officers in their daily efforts when managing the legal process for alleged offenders.

The Victoria Derbyshire programme on the BBC earlier this month featured interviews with anonymous comments from serving police personnel. The officers claim they face lengthy delays whilst trying to use this system and that some criminal cases are being dropped due to problems the software presents.

The software highlighted on the BBC is a police intelligence and case management system used by nine forces in the UK and was introduced early in the decade in a move to improve information sharing within and between police forces.

Simon Kempton, a principal officer of the Police Federation, commented on the featured system’s performance and highlighted that there has not been sufficient testing of IT systems at procurement stages before any contract have been confirmed. He also stressed that police software buyers must investigate API integration between police software systems as this will increase usability and support information sharing between networks.

The SentrySIS police suite of software tools that are currently being used by a police constabulary in the North East of England, allows officers to complete a series of constabulary-wide tasks via a simple cloud based dashboard. The software includes tools to securely conduct remote telephone statements with witnesses and victims over the telephone and allows local retailers to report crime directly to the police with a completed MG11 statement and the transfer of CCTV video within 15 minutes.

Managing Director and Lead Software Architect at SentrySIS, Lee Fella commented and said: “I’m glad industry people such as Simon are raising the issue of API integration between police software systems and third party suppliers as it’s quite common in other business sectors. We have been working with our police partners and other stakeholders for a number of months now developing API’s to send data to third party systems and avoid painstaking tasks, such as double-keying, for our SentrySIS users across our entire platform.”

Police constabularies seeking more information on the suite of police specific software tools within SentrySIS and how they can make their constabulary more efficient, please visit www.sentrysis.com.