Politicians and law enforcement community gather for second annual terrorism conference in Scotland

The recently published update to UK terrorism legislation will be on the agenda at a major conference to be held in Edinburgh on 8th June. Memex, Scottish-based suppliers of information management systems to police forces across the world, is sponsoring the second annual terrorism conference and will take part in a discussion session, which will be attended by key government and industry delegates.

The conference will focus on Community Cohesion and Contingency Planning and will also discuss the recently published update to the UK Counter Terrorism strategy, CONTEST 2, which will see the Government spend £3.5 billion a year on counter terrorism and security measures by 2011.

Dr Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, a lecturer on Collective Violence in the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, will chair the conference at the Roxburgh Hotel. There will also be keynote speeches from the Rt Hon Vernon Coaker MP, Minister of State for Security, Crime and Policing; ACC Allan Burnett, Co-ordinator of Counter Terrorism at ACPOS; Nick Croft from the Scottish Preventing Violence Extremism Unit within the Scottish Government and Asim Hafeez from the Home Office.

There will be various discussion sessions throughout the day on reducing violent extremism and promoting community cohesion across Scotland. The Memex presentation, entitled ‘Managing Information to Create Safer Communities,’ will discuss the challenges of information sharing between different agencies and best practice in engagement with difficult to reach populations.

Peter Ship, an industry specialist in UK law enforcement and intelligence and retired Detective Chief Inspector, will utilise his 30-years of operational experience to discuss the key issues in creating an intelligence network capable of protecting communities from terrorism. Graeme Pearson, previously head of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, will share what he has learned from his involvement in overseeing counter terrorist operations and describe the systems needed to deal with the issue of terrorism in the future.

Peter Ship, who works with Memex as an Intelligence Specialist, said: “We are pleased to be involved in this year’s terrorism conference and look forward to discussing the challenges Scotland and the UK face in building greater cohesion amongst communities and the prevention of further terrorist attacks. Technology plays a huge part in the fight against terrorism and we aim to provide end-to-end solutions which promote information sharing and multi-agency engagement to ensure Scotland’s law enforcement community and government agencies are equipped to deal with the challenges ahead.”