States Try To Take A Bite Out Of Crime
Information-sharing efforts by U.S. law enforcement agencies face formidable hurdles that are primarily cultural, financial, political, and legal rather than technological in nature. Nevertheless, states are working to link databases into crime-tracking and crime-prevention resources.
Minnesota’s CriMNet information network, which covers the entire breadth of the state’s criminal-justice system, is a distributed data system that CriMNet director Rich Stanek expects will become a information-sharing model for other law enforcement agencies.
Stanek contends that the network’s success relies not on technology but on a fundamental shift in business practices.
Ohio’s Office of Criminal Justice plans to link state-wide law enforcement–comprising some 940 agencies and 384 courts–through the Ohio Justice Information Network, which employs a “database-stays-in-place” model whereby data is maintained by the agency that generates it; “We don’t host data so jurisdictions can pick and choose what data to let out,” notes project director David Lewis.
The system is set up so that records purged from local courts are in turn deleted from the network.
The Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, which has been in operation since July, is composed of about 20 databases, uses a central data-warehouse model, and provides a chat room where members of the law enforcement community can post queries and answers; it also allows users to access data in any format. “We hope to be one-stop shopping for any agency, even those outside the country,” states Capt. Jon Kurtz, who adds that plans are underway to automate the system.
He also notes that the project’s biggest challenge was keeping the network compliant with Pennsylvania’s intelligence dissemination regulations.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Government Enterprise (11/03); Kahaner, Larry.