Liz Archer - Data Bureau - A day in the life - Careers - Surrey Police

Profile: Liz Archer - Data Bureau

Based at Surrey Police's headquarters in Guildford, the Data Bureau is open from seven in the morning until eleven at night, Monday to Friday - but that doesn't mean we have to work the whole stretch. I'm on an early today. We work a two-shift system between these hours, with six personnel operating each shift.

Outside of these hours, our work is covered by the Call Handling Centre at HQ.

The first thing we do at the start of a shift is to check with those leaving on the previous shift, to see what jobs and requests they have been handling, and to take over the task if necessary.

One of our primary tasks here is to be the keepers of information on the Police National Computer (or PNC for short). The system holds information on every vehicle registered in the UK, every person in the UK who has a criminal record or who is reported missing and items of property (everything from diggers to dogs) which have been reported stolen. Much of the vehicle information comes from the Crime Recording Bureau, also based at HQ, who deal with the reporting of crime to Surrey Police, but every officer has the ability to request an update to the system.

PNC is a fantastic tool and is used in the investigation of crime throughout the country. Every force in the UK has access to it.

Another large part of our work comes from the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) in Liverpool, averaging two hundred requests per day. The CRB is an executive agency of the Home Office, and was set up to help organizations make safer recruitment decisions.

By providing wider access to criminal record information, the CRB helps employers in the public, private and voluntary sectors identify candidates who may be unsuitable for certain roles. In particular, work involving contact with children and other vulnerable members of society.

Data Bureau performs checks on the applicants' name and addresses against local and national systems where that person has lived in the Surrey area within the past 5 years.

Finally, we direct all of the inter-force incoming and outgoing electronic mailing traffic to and from Surrey Police.

As you can see, we're very much in demand, dealing with queries from many different sources. And the information we give, naturally, has to be accurate. There's a lot to do, and so there's never a dull moment.