The European Union’s decision to pull the plug on UK law enforcement agencies’ post-Brexit access to its central crime database is making the fight against crime tougher for British police.
UK police forces consulted the system 603 million times in 2019 alone, according to Britain’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
In a letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the chair of the committee Baroness Hamwee wrote: “The UK’s loss of access to the Second Generation Schengen Information System (SIS II) represents a great decline in operational capacity for policing across the country, and that it may take several years for a substitute mechanism to be fully operational.
“International cooperation is essential in tackling present-day crime. A lack of cooperation, or barriers to the way in which the police and criminal justice agencies are allowed to work together, hamper investigations or give criminals impunity.”
Baroness Hamwee said that while she heard reassuring statements that cooperation is smooth in certain respects, “We also heard about some significant losses in capability.”
SIS II is the largest EU-wide security database. It contains palm prints, fingerprints, facial images and DNA data, as well as posting alerts on vulnerable or sought-after people, including missing persons, and on certain property, including passports, vehicles, banknotes, and firearms.
An inquiry held by the committee earlier this year was told that a replacement system for SIS II, known as International Law Enforcement Alerts Platform (I-LEAP), would involve signing a multilateral agreement between the UK and its partners but would not be in place until the 2027-28 financial year.
Steve Rodhouse, Director General (Operations) at the UK’s National Crime Agency told the inquiry that the police use of SIS II was “ubiquitous”.
“Every time an officer conducted a name-check on someone they came across on the street, whether they knew it or not, they were checking across the Schengen Information System,” he said.
“Every time they put an alert on the Police National Computer – let us say they were dealing with a missing person, and there was no cause to think that they had gone abroad but they needed to be circulated within the UK as missing – they were also creating an alert on the Schengen Information System.”
Deputy Chief Constable Peter Ayling of the UK’s National Police Chiefs Council said: “What we have at the moment is a process that you can only describe as suboptimal compared with SIS II.”
Baroness Hamwee has also asked the Home Secretary to look at the consequences of 13 EU Member States no longer extraditing to the UK which, she said: “Can result in offenders not being prosecuted or in victims and witnesses having to take part in proceedings abroad.”
Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden have stopped extraditing their own nationals to Britain.
The UK Crown Prosecution Service “regards a further three countries as having a nationality bar due to the conditions that they impose for the surrender of their own nationals to the UK”, namely Austria, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
