Mr Brokenshire is to have a speech at the Payments Council seminar on e-crime in central London. He is to suggest IT specialists to consider becoming police volunteers in the National Cyber Crime Unit, in order to help stop criminals trying to fleece Britons of hundreds of millions of pounds online.
The speech comes after a police chief said forces should consider recruiting more unpaid special constables to help them cope with the Government’s budget cuts. Now the Government wants experts with specialist skills not traditionally found in law enforcement to volunteer with the new National Crime Agency (NCA) and the National Cyber Crime Unit in order to help protect the public.
Forces will need to rethink the way they work with communities and whether community policing should be left solely to professional police officers and key staff.
The government has been pushing on a number of levels to improve its cyber skills. Intelligence agency GCHQ, for example, has been working on ways to attract the right calibre of person.
“Through this means, we can share skills and knowledge on how we deal with cyber crime”, the Minister shall say.
Brokenshire admitted that the government may never accurately assess the full impact of cyber crime. More than 46,000 cases of cybercrime were reported to the Action Fraud centre last year, amounting to attempts to defraud the public of £292 million, Mr Brokenshire is due to say.
He will say that it was very difficult to give an accurate figure to the cost of cyber crime to the UK economy, adding that the government knows this is only a fraction of all crimes committed.
Article source: http://www.theinformationdaily.com/2012/11/02/cyber-volunteers-needed-to-help-the-police
