The Italian police consist of the regular security police under the Interior Ministry, the Carabinieri of the Defense Ministry, and the customs and tax police under the Finance Ministry. The three police services have a homogeneous structure throughout the country. The regular security police are centrally coordinated. In addition to a basic structure of provincial police authorities, there are networks of border police, highway police, and railway police. One of the central offices of particular importance for mass searches is the National Coordination Center for Deployment of the Criminal Police, which is the main agency coordinating crime prevention and control and which controls laboratory and data storage facilities. Crime has increased in recent years in Italy in the areas of drug trafficking, thefts, art thefts, counterfeiting, bank robberies, and kidnapping for ransom. Many crimes involve foreign citizens or activities. To combat the new types of crime, the Italian police have developed a data processing system with immediate retrieval, storage, and transfer capability around the clock. The system has a number of useful data banks for object searches: missing vehicle records, a weapons list, and computerized files of stolen documents, stolen bank notes, counterfeit bills, and suspended drivers' licenses. For manhunts the system has files on persons with criminal records, international offenders, surveillance of known criminals, automobiles of persons with criminal records, assumed names, wanted individuals, and hotel registrations. The newsletter of wanted persons is also produced by computer. The security police maintain computerized archives of offenses and offenders, drug dealers, and organized crimes. The computerized data is especially useful for permanent border check points, for temporary roadblocks, and for special activities such as police patrols following bank robberies, terrorist attacks, and kidnappings for ransom. Search measures on an international level are handled by the appropriate subdivisions of the central office of the national criminal police. The police maintain close ties with the mass media to facilitate public involvement in large-scale searches when that proves necessary.