The police run a casualty bureau to collect and collate details of all persons involved in the incident. This assists the emergency services in putting together a picture of what has happened, providing the scale of the incident and numbers of people involved. It also assists HM Coroner in the identification of the deceased for whom s/he will have to hold an inquest.

The information is received from a variety of sources such as the ambulance loading point, police documentation teams at hospitals, rest centre registration documents and the general public phoning into the bureau to report a missing person (Misper).

This process is operated through the HOLMES II computer system which accelerates the process with direct data input onto the data base as a call is taken. The data is crosschecked by a collation unit who identify matches between the various sources of information to confirm a persons identity and their location.