Police plan to expand
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re by Karen Miles
The volume of police intelligence for trapping illegal hauliers is about to balloon more than SO-fold with the opening of a central computer database on commercial vehicle operators.
The system, which is expected to func
tion in a month's time, will be a significant new tool for UK traffic police, who have always found it difficult to share intelligence—action taken against operators has usually been based mainly on local information.
Organisers of the Metropolitan Policerun central computer. which will hold national information on opera
tors; individual trucks and drivers, expect enforcement levels to improve.
The system, code-named Police Intelligence Commercial Enquiry (PIKE) should improve current poor levels of enforcement targeting by police. "If we find a vehicle is being stopped all the time in different parts of the country then it might prompt people to start looking at it. Before we would not have known," says one Met police officer.
Details of 3,000 operators are already lo eil, including facts gained from roadside police checks and infringements and convictions.
However, funding constraints look set to prevent the pooled police intelligence being shared with the Vehicle Inspectorate's computerised national database on operators, JED!.
• Police forces, social security staff and customs officers will be manning a day of roadside checks throughout the UK and the rest of the European Union in September.
Information on UK drivers and hauliers gathered by foreign agencies will be fed back to the UK enforcement authorities and put into the new police central database and the VI's JEDI system.