Yesterday’s Irish Times carried a story of how, after some extensive detective work, the Irish Police finally tracked down the most dangerous driver in Ireland, a Polish gentleman by the name of Prawo Jazdy.
This individual was given hundreds of speeding tickets and parking tickets over the past few years, and by June 2007 he had over 50 separate entries in the Irish Police computer system. So slippery was this offender that he kept giving police a different address almost every time he was stopped and ticketed.
He was finally brought to book by a quick thinking officer in the Traffic Corps of the Irish Police who tracked him down using a structured Master Data source. Surely this is an example of Information and Intelligence lead policing at its best?
eh… no. The Master Data source that the officer used was a Polish to English dictionary. From the Irish Times:
In a letter dated June 17th, 2007, an officer from the Garda traffic division wrote that it had come to his attention that members inspecting Polish driving licences were noting Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name.
“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” he wrote.
“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quiet [sic] embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.
“He can also be found on the Fixed Charge Processing System as well. This mistake needs to be rectified immediately and a memo sent to the members concerned. I also think that Garda Information Service Centre [in] Castlebar should be notified and some kind of alert put on these two words.”
It would seem that the computer systems have been updated with an explanatory note about driving licence formats from other countries and a memo has been sent to all police stations drawing their attention to the issue.
This story was picked up by the BBC and by The Risks Digest. The discussion in the Risks Digest correctly points out that his is not a systems issue – the software worked as required. Another commenter to us by email asks the simple question:
“Did the police not ASK the person’s name instead of just reading the licence?”
This story hit metropolitan dailies in Australian as well.
If you look at:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawo_jazdy
you can see that it seems to be a problem with the old national Polish format which is better with the new EU Polish format.
Asking for a name can actually be quit difficult when the name is in a foreign language to you, and the spelling mistake combinations for writing down a foreign name is unbelievable high.
That is actually what we also see in databases around today. Globalisation and shared service centres is causing that database users are dealing with name and address formats that they are not familiar with. This challenges the data quality as more mistakes are made and sometimes one wrongly adapts your own format.
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