Law Enforcement Gains Ground In Data Integration And Analysis
Law enforcement authorities see the benefit of having a complete view of criminals and are continuing to move toward integrating and analyzing data on criminals and crimes at the federal, state, and local levels.
For example, the Justice Department has reported that the integration of data from the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System with the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Automated Biometric Identification System has helped to intercept 4,000 foreign nationals wanted for serious crimes.
Tests remain underway at border patrol stations and ports of entry, but the new system is set to be extended to 41 sites in March.
Meanwhile, products such as CrimeNtel and CaseInfo from CI Technologies allow local police departments to document crimes and help manage their criminal intelligence, generating queries about potential links in facts as information is entered into the database.
The products facilitate data sharing among police departments, and a Web-accessible database will enable police to cooperate in real time.
An integrated system would have been helpful in a case such as the one involving the D.C. snipers because its events occurred over several departmental boundaries.
Both the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Pennsylvania State Police use Information Builders’ WebFOCUS, which automatically transfers data to the FBI’s national crime database.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from KM World (03/03) Vol. 12, No. 3, P. 8; Lamont, Judith.