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British Columbia Police Acquire Facial Recognition Technology

Provincewide mugshot storage and sharing system

Sophisticated facial recognition technology will be provided to over 5,000 police officers across more than 100 police jurisdictions throughout British Columbia, under an $800,000 (CAN) contract with Imagis Technologies. The solution will be an integrated component of the province-wide Police Records Information Management Environment (PRIME-BC), and -- along with standard mugshot record storage and search capabilities -- will enable officers to access critical information on unidentified arrestees or subjects of investigation using only a facial image, increasing the likelihood of positive identification. Accelerating identification of non-cooperative subjects enhances the safety of both officers and arrestees.

"We selected Imagis based the strength of the company's reputation within the British Columbia police community, the operational value brought by the firm's integration of facial recognition with key police processes, and the affordability with which that solution will interoperate with our existing Versadex Records Management System called PRIME-BC," said Russell Sanderson, General Manager of PRIME Corp.

To create the solution -- which will be the first of its kind deployed to all police jurisdictions and officers within a single province or state -- Imagis will utilize a new breed of application known as a computer "smart client," which fuses the strengths of classic enterprise applications with the extensibility of Web services. The smart client operates on a platform combining two of the company's core technologies: the Briyante Integration Environment and the Facial Recognition Engine. The result is a standards-based solution in a Services Oriented Architecture that can easily interoperate with the various and diverse database technologies deployed by justice agencies around the world. Imagis data integration solutions are already providing information sharing benefits to several large police jurisdictions in the United States, including King County, Washington.

The advantages of Imagis solutions are being realized by more organizations, not only those involved in the justice sector, but those with a need to share information, interoperate disparate systems, and who need to migrate precious data and business intelligence to newer, more standards-based platforms. The company has an excellent reputation for successful deployments and satisfied customers, and is looking toward a bright future as it expands its offerings to other markets.

About PRIME-BC

In May 1998, the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police adopted the vision of a common information system for the Province of BC. This initiated the PRIME-BC project and Phase 1 has seen police officers in Port Moody, Vancouver, and Richmond (RCMP) be successfully converted from a paper-based records environment to an electronic one. Phase 1 of the project was delivered by E-Comm, Emergency Communications for Southwest BC Incorporated, which is an emergency communications corporation owned by public sector shareholders. Subsequent phases will be implemented by PRIME Corp., which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of E-Comm. BC is the first jurisdiction in the country to adopt a province-wide, online police records management system.