County, cities cooperate on public safety
Brown County and the city of Green Bay, Wis., have long shared a vision of a comprehensive Public Safety Information System.
Consequently, combining the energies of the two local governments, along with those of the nearby cities of DePere and Ashwaubenon, simply made good business sense to Brown County Executive Nancy Nusbaum and Green Bay Mayor Paul Jadin.
“Our vision was to implement a solution that would feature centralized dispatch, a common platform, shared databases and software and integration with non-public safety applications, as well as uniform policies, procedures and forms,” Nusbaum says. “And in doing so, we knew we could obtain a better solution at a more cost-effective price for all parties involved.”
The concept of a shared information system was appealing for several reasons.
For one, bulk purchasing allows local public safety agencies to take advantage of economies of scale in software licensing, hardware procurement and training and implementation costs. Additionally, on-going maintenance costs can be shared.
None of this would have been available to the county or the involved cities on an individual basis.
The project currently underway includes creation of an integrated multi-jurisdictional Public Safety System for computer-aided dispatch, law enforcement records, fire/EMS records, corrections management, gang tracking and the heart of a mobile data solution.
For example, a county-wide gang-tracking solution will allow Brown County agencies to track and retrieve information on known gang members and gang-related crimes. County agencies will have access to gang members by name, gang affiliation, vehicles and acquaintances, as well as identifying marks s uch as tattoos.
With the comprehensive relational database design, the officers will be able to access gang-related information from virtually anywhere in the system. This will give a Green Bay officer who pulls a vehicle over for a traffic citation access to information that would identify the vehicle owner as the known acquaintance of an individual questioned in a gang-related crime in Ahshwaubenon.
At the same time, the officer could determine whether the suspect was wanted for questioning by the Brown County Sheriff’s Department.
By combining their efforts, Brown County agencies will also be able to incorporate mobile data computing that will allow officers in the field to access state and national databases from their mobile computers and provide them with the latest in photo-imaging technology, the latter drastically reducing the costs associated with the snapshot identification methods used in the past.
Aside from offering a safer environment for the county’s citizens, the technology also improves officer safety.
Still, despite the fact that a county-wide central depository for records information seems like a common sense solution, many agencies typically maintain their own records and on-line sharing of information is rare. But criminals do not follow jurisdictional boundaries, and information sharing can be a matter of life or death for officers in the field.
Knowing that a driver in a vehicle possesses a gun permit issued in a neighboring community and that there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest, for example, is critical information that an officer should have prior to his or her approach.
Thus, through the cooperation of a number of jurisdictions, Brown County’s public safety officers, as well as its citizens, enjoy a safer existence.