Jeffco computer link designed to speed crime-solving

by Ann Schrader
12/30/05

A software system soon to be rolled out in Jefferson County will help police get tougher on crime.

Called COPLINK, the secure intranet-based program takes pieces of information, analyzes them and provides direction and leads for investigative work.

"People don't see it as being Arvada or Broomfield as they cross jurisdictional lines to commit crimes," said Arvada Deputy Police Chief Don Wick, but information about their misdeeds hasn't always been communicated between crime fighters.

"This gives us the ability to connect things," said Wick, head of the law enforcement information- sharing consortium.

While officials say crime analysts in various police departments already communicate well, the computer program does it faster and puts together bits of details that might have been overlooked, network experts say.

For example, in the recent rash of police impersonation cases, individual law enforcement agencies could have fed partial license plate information, vehicle color or make, and the person's basic description into COPLINK.

Wick said the result could have been a list of people who own a certain type of vehicle.

"The individual might have been contacted in Lakewood for something innocuous, while a larger crime was committed in Broomfield," Wick said. "Each city has a little piece of the pie that we would not have known about."

Each agency controls the data that are shared and retains the information.

Officials in Arapahoe, Boulder and Douglas counties have called Jefferson County to learn about the consortium.

"Everybody's watching us," said Dean Davis, support systems manager for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, which will be the network's hub. "What we have been doing manually for a long time will be electronically."
Hardware is being built, and the electronic record-keeping systems used by Jefferson County, Arvada, Lakewood and Westminster are being merged.

The system is supported through various federal law enforcement grants.

Davis said the information "highway" was completed in early December.

After brief training sessions in January, the four agencies will go live. Three smaller agencies - Golden, Wheat Ridge and Broomfield - will join in the late spring.

While the Jefferson County consortium is the first in the state, COPLINK has clients in more than 130 jurisdictions across the nation, including in Alaska; in part of California; near Tampa Bay, Fla.; in Des Moines, Iowa; and in Phoenix.

COPLINK was developed by Tucson-based Knowledge Computing Corp.