SA police keep tabs on gangs with $5.2m IT system

South Australian police are spending AU$5.2 million over five years on an IT system to track criminal motorcycle gangs.

The new system will work with existing legacy mainframes to form a vault of data on gangs and their members. Police will search and analyse the data to provide necessary evidence — for example details on gangs' criminal activities and meetings — for legal processes such as applying to the state's Attorney General to have a gang declared outlawed.

The system keeps a record of members of outlawed gangs and any court orders the police have sought to stop members meeting together, as well as any breaches of the orders.

Police officers will be alerted to any relevant orders when they access systems for everyday duties and can make new entries, cutting down on paperwork.

The AU$5.2 million project, announced in last week's State budget, is due to start next month and scheduled to be completed by June 2013.

Also on the police ICT radar is an ongoing project to replace aging Motorola XTS3000 radio units with newer XTS5000s, with AU$1.4 million budgeted for the scheme this year.

Part of the funding will go to replacing 400 ageing in-car mobile data terminals, which relay jobs from the communications data centre to officers in police cars and allow officers to perform queries such as looking up car registration numbers.

The replacement process is expected to last several years, with a tender expected to go out in mid to late 2009.

Prisoner management has also received a boost, with AU$5.65 million over two years going towards installing a modern CCTV system using 500 digital camera units.