COPLINK® Deployed Across Florida Region for
Major Crime Fighting and Homeland Security Initiative

07/21/05
Tucson, AZ/Tampa, FL

Knowledge Computing Corporation announced today that the company was awarded a multi-phase contract to support the Tampa Bay Security Network with its critically acclaimed crime fighting solution COPLINK®. The project is funded by the Department of Homeland Security through the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant program and other domestic security grant funding. As a regional and statewide initiative, the Tampa Bay Security Network will ultimately be linked to Florida’s other six information-sharing systems, to create a statewide law enforcement information-sharing network.

“We’re excited to be working with some of Florida’s most forward thinking leaders in law enforcement to support a major regional crime fighting initiative with our COPLINK solution,” said Bob Griffin, CEO of Knowledge Computing Corporation. “This program further advances our national position as a trusted industry leader in providing tactical analytically-driven crime solving and homeland security solutions.”

Phase I of the initiative is operational and links the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Clearwater Police Department, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, St. Petersburg Police Department, Tampa Police Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Phase II will join the remaining fourteen Tampa Urban Area law enforcement agencies to the network. By July 2006, all fifty-eight law enforcement agencies throughout the Tampa Bay’s nine-county region will have complete access to the system.

Since the Tampa Bay Security Network went live, participating agencies have identified several qualified suspects that resulted in arrest warrants in cases that otherwise might have remained unsolved, including a pair of suspects charged with committing multiple armed robberies.

“The Tampa Bay Security Network gives law enforcement in the Tampa Bay a formidable addition to the arsenal of weapons we use daily in the war on terrorism, the war on crime and the war on drugs,” said Stephen Hogue, Tampa Chief of Police. “With COPLINK, our agencies’ investigators and officers will have at their fingertips a sophisticated analytics tool that is among the most effective, yet easy to use, technologies available for sharing information, analyzing criminal patterns and generating leads.”

Officers using the system have noted the technology’s effectiveness in quickly identifying drug and gang networks. One use of the system involves identifying unknown persons who are associated with the principals of a court-ordered wiretap investigation. Major Gene Stokes, Special Operations Division, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office points out, “Commonly, all associates of a crime network may not become known to detectives until we are well into a wire intercept investigation. With the Tampa Bay Security Network, we are able to flesh out the identities of previously unknown criminal associates prior to commencing the wiretap. Additionally, we use the Visualizer function to graphically display the associations between subjects of our investigation and discovered associates.”

“We believe the Tampa Bay Security Network will give our region’s law enforcement an unsurpassed information-sharing and analytics capability,” said David Gee, Hillsborough County Sheriff. “With COPLINK, no longer will criminals be able to avoid detection by pulling up stakes to move from one jurisdiction to another, as they continue their vocation of plotting, stealing and harming.”

COPLINK provides unparalleled analysis and decision support for rapidly identifying criminal suspects, relationships and patterns that can help solve and prevent crime. It works by allowing vast quantities of structured and seemingly unrelated data, currently housed in incompatible computer-based record management systems (RMS) at various agencies, to be organized under a single, highly secure intranet-based platform.

COPLINK will be used by The Tampa Bay Security Network for law enforcement purposes only, utilizing public data from existing law enforcement databases such as arrest records and traffic citations. One search using known facts from an ongoing criminal investigation can produce qualified leads in seconds – a process that prior to COPLINK, often took days or weeks. Through sophisticated analytics, COPLINK builds ‘institutional memory’, reduces knowledge gaps, and prevents criminals from falling through the cracks.

COPLINK first catapulted into the national spotlight for its proof of concept role following the Montgomery County, Maryland sniper investigation. Today, the solution is in use in over 130 jurisdictions nationwide from Boston to San Diego helping police officers fight crime and improve community safety.

Winner of numerous awards, COPLINK was recognized twice by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for deployments in Tucson, Arizona and across the State of Alaska. The Center for Digital Government also recognized COPLINK as one of the best of breed and most innovative IT projects undertaken by cities in the nation.

About Knowledge Computing Corporation

Knowledge Computing Corporation provides technology-based crime fighting solutions to leading edge law enforcement agencies nationwide. Its critically-acclaimed product, COPLINK®, in use since 1998, is based on knowledge management technology first prototyped by top-ranked researchers in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson through a grant by the National Institute of Justice. The technologies developed at Knowledge Computing Corporation have been tested and proven by law enforcement agencies around the country. For more information: www.knowledgecc.com or www.coplink.com.