Urgent reforms in the UK are needed after thousands of criminal records were accidentally deleted from an IT system that was first developed in the 1970s, an independent report said.
In January, an engineer accidentally deleted 209,550 offense records, including fingerprint and DNA data, from the Police National Computer (PNC). While all the records have been fully recovered, an independent inquiry has attributed the “critical incident” to both “human error” and failures at the management level. The PNC is based in Hendon, North London, and holds personal records of 13 million UK citizens, including data for arrests, convictions, and vehicle owners.
