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HOMELAND SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Unlocking police data
December 2004
--- HST looks at how police departments are approaching
information sharing and data management.
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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.”
Police departments traditionally have
several types of ‘stovepipe’ databases
that don’t ‘talk to each other’” – Robert Griffin
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.”
“Efforts to improve the flow of
information between local, state and
federal agencies were under way long before 9/11” – Harlin McEwen
“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.
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