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COPLINK helping
catch more bad guys
by Susan
Thornton
Denver Post
3/05/2008
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Bad guys, beware.
Colorado law enforcement officials are in the process of implementing
COPLINK, a "quantum leap" for police efforts across the state, according
to Aurora Police Chief Daniel Oates.
COPLINK is commercially developed software that accepts data from
multiple police and sheriff's departments and links it seamlessly to
give law enforcement a huge boost in getting criminals off the street.
Parts of the software program have been used since 2006 in Jefferson
County, Arvada, Lakewood, Westminster, Golden, Wheat Ridge and
Broomfield. Now, they and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and law
enforcement agencies in Aurora, Denver, Grand Junction/Mesa County, and
Douglas, Adams and Arapahoe counties have come together to implement all
of the modules in the software.
The consortium of agencies paid $1.2 million (half of it from federal
grants) to cover COPLINK's licensing fee. Each participating agency will
be responsible for the cost of merging its own data into the COPLINK
software, and annual operating costs will be shared among agencies. (On
Friday, Congressman Ed Perlmutter and Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard
will present a check for $587,000 to help Adams County and the cities of
Thornton, Northglenn, Commerce City and Brighton install COPLINK.)
Oates explains that COPLINK is much easier to use than a typical
records- management system. For example, officers may respond to a
robbery in Aurora involving two men. If they arrest "bad guy No. 1,"
COPLINK may show them that he was stopped earlier in another
jurisdiction with "bad guy No. 2."
COPLINK can tell police who the first suspect called from jail, his last
known address, his phone number and partial license plate, where he
hangs out, and his arrest record.
A simple query can yield dozens of possible leads, Oates says. While it
might take a detective two weeks to get a lead in a robbery, COPLINK can
result in a lead in as little as an afternoon.
Oates points out that most of the data loaded into COPLINK by
participating jurisdictions is from official police records, which
become public information following an arrest.
However, COPLINK also stores some intelligence data that is speculative
and does not derive from arrests. That might be more problematic for
civil libertarians, but Oates says the information entered must meet
federal guidelines on privacy as well as a "whole body of law" that
governs federally funded data systems.
Oates believes that the word about COPLINK's effectiveness will "spread
like wildfire" among Colorado detectives, crime analysts and officers,
and that other policing agencies across the state will want to join the
consortium as soon as possible.
Each of the police chiefs and sheriffs who have put aside egos and
jurisdictional differences to implement the computerized data-sharing
system deserve a vote of thanks from the law-abiding citizens of the
metro area.
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