CEPOL Research & Science Conference 2022 MRU, Vilnius

The Importance of Forensic Speed in Crime Fighting - making things digital
06-08, 11:30–12:00 (Europe/Vilnius), Auditorium (Plenary) Room C-I-201

The Dutch National Police had been struggling to improve crime fighting. A lot of challenges (personnel, knowledge, ICT and a lot of fragmentation were at the root of the problem. In response, a new concept of crime fighting, where speed and intelligence are key, has been developed. This concept is made operational via eight experiments and living labs. These developments are properly evaluated in terms of their contribution to crime fighting. Speeding up forensic analysis and giving direction to the inquiry can only be done by standardizing, organizing and making the process digital. Imagine that we speed up the analysis of fingerprints, facial recognition, DNA and drugs. This is done in a collaboration between the Police, the District Attorney’s Office, and the commercial market. The presentation will elaborate on the Dutch lessons learned over the last few years, ‘that speed matters’ at the centre of it. The next steps will be to scale up the new ways of working.

See also: Presentation by Ruud Staijen (9.5 MB)

Ruud Staijen, MSc MBA, Program Director. Commissioner of the Dutch National Police, works as a policeman, sociologist and business expert. He holds a degree from the Dutch Police Academy, studied social sciences at the University of Groningen (MSc) in the Netherlands and completed his Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the universities of Rotterdam and Berkeley, California.
Ruud worked in various operational and leading roles within the Dutch National Police. From 2013 until 2018 he contributed his experience to the force as an ICT programme director. Within that context, the standardization and redesign of information systems of the newly formed Dutch National Police was the major focus. Ruud was responsible for Operational Police Processes.
In 2019 Ruud became Program Director of a new program in the forensic field, focusing on: DNA techniques, fingerprint, facial recognition, voice recognition, drugs analytics, remote forensics, mobile laboratories etc.. With this programme the Dutch police aims to increase the speed of biometric tracing and is working on the growing importance of forensic investigations and forensic intelligence and how this may give better direction within criminal investigations.