The interior ministers of six European nations met in Britain this October to discuss how they should tackle terrorism and organised crime in the future. G6 meetings are internationally important and this year’s gathering was successfully policed by Warwickshire Police Force with mutual aid from 12 other police forces.

To police this event Warwickshire Police implemented an extensive security strategy combining several technologies. They called upon QRO to advise and assist in integrating Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) into the strategy.

The G6 meeting in Stratford-upon-Avon, hosted by the Home Secretary, John Reid, brought together the interior ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK – known collectively as the ‘G6’ – to develop concrete plans on quick and effective methods to make their countries safer.

ANPR was used to monitor the movement of vehicles in the vicinity of the event, leading up to and during the conference. Following a joint site visit, QRO recommended to Warwickshire Police that Deploy-IT units, developed by QRO, be utilised. Deploy-IT units offer robust, flexible, continuous and unobtrusive operation, meeting the exacting requirements of the Warwickshire Police. Installed within one working day by QRO, the Deploy-IT units were mounted on suitable structures in strategic locations powered by existing mains power supply.

The field Deploy-IT units used a combined IR and colour camera connected to a weatherproofed ANPR processor able to capture and to store images of 1 million vehicles and their number plates. The field units were also equipped with a GPRS modems to transmit registration numbers, and when requested, images to a Deploy-IT Server located in the Control Room at Warwickshire Police HQ. Vehicle registration numbers were transmitted from the field units to the Deploy-IT server via a GPRS Virtual Private Network (VPN) to guarantee the security and accuracy of the data. Registration numbers received from the field units were processed by the Deploy-IT Server for the purposes of the security operation and stored as vehicle movement records in an indexed database for post operational analysis.

From the initial contact, made by Warwickshire Police, to deployment of a fully operational system it took the QRO team just 7 working days. QRO Solutions is pleased to have had the opportunity to work with Warwickshire Police on this critically important security operation for the G6 meeting, and that the security objectives were met with the aid of ANPR.