Have a look at that screenshot there. It’s from yesterday’s online London Telegraph story about the twins who were reportedly mauled by a fox.

The blurry picture you see was taken by one of the first police officers to arrive at the family’s home. It shows a crazily blurred image of a fox. Or perhaps a fox cub. Well, it looks generally like a fox.

It’s so blurred, though, you can’t really make much out.

Look at the door panes too. Blurred. Rubbish.

I think it’s excellent that the police officer had the presence of mind to snap a shot on his phone.

But it’s simply ridiculous that he or she has clearly had to use a bollocks handset with a rubbish camera to take the photo. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a BlackBerry camera. The 9700′s camera is a lot better now, but the 9000 or similar can be super-blurry in the wrong conditions.

There are, of course, serious issues with police officers taking photos.

Is the photo they’ve just snapped evidence? Can it be reliably traced to their handset and their location? Can it be used in court? Can it be used as circumstantial perspective by a jury? Does it prove there was a fox at the house when the police arrived?

There’s a whole host of issues here.

First, though: Get a better camera on the phone. An N86 would, for example, have delivered a decent snap. It might have needed the flash too, but it would have been viewable.

Second? Well, it’s time to get in touch with Pierre and his team at Handheld PCs. They’ve create a super service thus:

They offer a service by the name of Hand-e-Pix. And it’s a piece of genius. It enables mobile device photography to be timestamped and geo-located and managed securely using an organisation’s Active Directory policies. So organisations like Police forces, local councils, traffic wardens, civil engineering firms and so on — they can now enable their people to use the cameras on their corporate handsets. The implications of this are vast.

I’m quoting from a post I published on Mobile Developer TV late last year after I filmed an interview with Pierre at RIM’s European Alliance event.

Here’s the interview:

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PocketCop, as you might expect, is a mobile policing system based on the BlackBerry platform. PocketCop is provided by InterAct. The system essentially puts all policing information at the fingertips of officers on the beat. Before PocketCop, officers had to request information either by calling and communicating with Dispatch (a time consuming approach) or by using the in-vehicle laptop system (useful, but prevents officers from getting out on the streets).

Gayle and Sheree talked on camera about their experiences with PocketCop and to say they are delighted with the system is, perhaps, a massive understatement. They described how they issued Blackberry devices to 80 officers as test — and feedback proved so positive that they recently issued 2,000 more BlackBerries to officers.

I love this. I think it’s a brilliant, brilliant use of technology. Sheree — a sworn officer herself — described on camera how the BlackBerry based service makes things so much easier for officers on the beat. Indeed it helps them get back into the community rather than having to stay glued to their cars — and the system enables Dispatch to track the officer’s physical location as well. The implications for officer safety are profound. No longer does Dispatch have to keep on asking ‘where are you’ to an officer in harm’s way. And from a basic productivity perspective, officers are able to query drivers licenses (complete with photos), most wanted lists, car number plate lookups and so on. Plus, of course, they’ve got a messaging device too so they can stay in touch with control easily.

I’ll be bringing you this interview in the next day or so hopefully. Just need to get the time to get it off the camera and up. Really, really smart use of mobile technology.

In terms of publicity alone Apple and OpenMoku should be fighting it out to give the iconic police force their handsets and Orange, Vodafone etc. would be well advised to start chasing after this one.

It’s all a bid to cut red tape and give more officers access to information instantly when on patrol, saving on communication time.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found a PC quicker when it comes to accessing the internet. Quicker and easier still when it comes to finding what you want on a screen. Since the bobbies have access to a control room and people able to check the police database what benefit is there? Also, what are the police searching for online if it’s not a suspect?

According to Tech Radar:

The government has already spent a wad of cash on deploying 10,000 of said devices to 27 forces, but the new cash injection should swell that number to around 30,000 2010.

Albeit the blog is in the same situation as me as the police force still hasn’t found its stolen bike.

At first glance it seems a well thought through move so will probably make political sense but I’m not so sure it is. Would I rather have this or 750 more police (and that’s at a very high £33k salary each) on the streets / in control rooms with access to a police radio and the internet and the police database then I’d choose the latter.

The decision comes as part of a case, reported by the LA Times that saw a policeman take his employer to court after police department staff read his text messages.

After the policeman exceeded the monthly text allowance paid for by his employer, the police department asked its service provider to turn over records of the contents of his messages.

Wrong move, said the judge, who decided the service provider had breached federal Stored Communications Act, and that the text messages were covered by the 4th amendment. In short, the employer didn’t have a right to look at the texts without the employee’s say so, or without a policy in place warning staff their messages were being monitored.

Does anyone know what laws apply here in the UK?

It’s already being used by community action group Crime Stoppers and is already up and running in 16 Canadian cities. Another 32 cities in the US will be deploying the system soon, and after that, the application could be on its way to the UK.

Rather handily, the anonymity is two-way: the tips go from users’ phones and are delivered anonymously and the police can reply back without having access to the phone number of the user who sent in the tip. I wonder how it sits with privacy legislation: if cops really needed to get hold of the tipster, is there any privacy legislation that would block them?

Apparently, the move was inspired by the London bombings as well as riots in Sydney. According to ABC, the state’s police minister has warned would-be crime fighters to put their safety above gathering evidence.

With cameraphones’ resolution now around 5 megapixels or higher on most new models, it can’t be long til this type of footage will start appearing in court as exhibit A.