HOMELAND SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Unlocking police data

HST looks at how police departments are approaching information sharing and data management.
12/04

It has become widely accepted that information sharing is essential for effective law enforcement and the war on terror. What information, and who to share it with, is more difficult to agree on.

In the US we have numerous small, medium and large local governments that are not controlled by the state governments or the federal government. For the most part each local and state police agency purchases its own hardware and software for data management. Although there is a growing trend to cooperatively regionalize systems, this means that there are approximately 17,000 different police administrators making decisions on how they will manage their data.

Sharing across borders has also become simultaneously more necessary and more difficult. In order to prevent another September 11, terrorists must be stopped, not inside our borders, but in their homelands.

Counting the cost

But effective data and information management is not only difficult to achieve, it is costly. Harlin McEwen, Chairman of the IACP Communications and Technology Committee, points out: “Staff training and ongoing maintenance of hardware and software are very expensive. Many agencies do not have adequate budgets to support these.” After 45 years in the field of law enforcement, including as a Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, he should know.

Robert Griffin, President of Knowledge Computing Corporation which has developed the COPLINK system concedes that cost was one of the key concerns when developing the system.

“Law enforcement agencies have already invested a tremendous amount in technology – especially records management systems. COPLINK protects that investment because it is not designed to replace legacy systems, but sits on top of them. Agencies have a real need to protect and enhance the investments they’ve already made – especially because of funding limitations and the competitiveness of securing government grants,” says Griffin.

New developments

“Data management has not drastically changed in the US since 9/11, but there are indications that some improvements in data management have been driven by the events of 9/11. Efforts to improve the flow of information between local, state and federal agencies were under way long before 9/11 and there are numerous examples of ongoing significant improvement,” says McEwen.

National systems such as the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC) and the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) managed by the FBI have long been the most crucial and widely accessed law enforcement systems. There are also Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) that have long shared investigative and intelligence information among member agencies. Sharing across agencies is crucial, but as McEwen explains: “There are numerous vendors who offer competing products for data management. Decisions are generally made at the local level which, of course, causes difficulties in sharing information between disparate systems.”

Data integrity is also a big issue. With COPLINK, data continues to reside and be updated at its existing source. No data is ever entered into the system directly. Automatic trigger refresh mechanisms ensure that if new data is added or old data is deleted from the existing source, it is automatically reflected in COPLINK. This makes the data more trust worthy.

Meanwhile the NCIC and IAFIS databases are kept up to date under a shared management arrangement between the FBI and the FBI Advisory Policy Board (APB) explains McEwan. “The APB membership is made up of representatives of local, state and federal agencies. In the sharing of investigative information, civil rights and privacy concerns have been an impediment to sharing among agencies. There is also an increasing discussion about information overload for individual police officers.”

Griffin adds: “There are many technologies that are available capable of providing rudimentary information sharing through simple query broker technology, but at this point, it’s a parlor trick that is already obsolete – especially when multiple agencies or states want to work together. The increase in the amount of information that has to be processed in an information rich environment is such that without analytics and visualization, there is no value.”

“Police departments traditionally have several types of ‘stovepipe’ databases that don’t ‘talk to each other’ – arrest records, traffic citations, mug shots, sex offender lists, etc. that run on various platforms. The same suspect can be in multiple databases. Prior to COPLINK, an officer would have to sit down at several different computer terminals to query each of these databases separately to find information relevant to his or her investigation. It’s a time-consuming process that can potentially have life and death consequences in situations like child abductions where every second counts,” Griffin continues.

“There is an ‘80/20 rule’ in law enforcement – 80 percent of all crimes are committed by 20 percent of the criminal population. In other words, they are already in the records system somewhere – it’s just a matter of finding them.”

COPLINK works by allowing vast quantities of structured and seeming­ly unrelated data, currently housed in various incompatible databases and record management systems, to be organized, consolidated and rapidly analyzed over a secure intranet-based platform. One search using known or partial facts from an ongoing investigation can produce qualified leads in seconds – a process that used to take days.

The flexible architecture allows agencies to choose from data warehousing, distributed techniques or a combination of both while scaling the solution to respect the preferences of each agency.

With COPLINK, law enforcement and intelligence agencies can tailor their information sharing and crime analysis initiatives using existing components from technologies they already use. This allows participating agencies to create a seamlessly integrated solution without incurring the disproportionately high cost of untested, custom solutions.