The Gulf Coast Solution
A new model for the future of secure, centralized sharing of public safety information across counties, municipalities and among various departments has arrived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. It began in Gulfport in the summer of 2000 at the suggestion of a forward-thinking Harrison County sheriff who simply wanted to be able to share information among the three coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson.
To implement a significant change in their system required funds, and assistance in federal funding came under the auspices of Senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott. Executive project director Major Julian Allen, Ph.D., of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department put together the project plan.
Allen emphasizes that the success of the system is due to the considerable input of the users — the officer on the street, the fireman answering the call and the clerks and dispatchers who actually have to use first responder information tools in the real world.
“We went to 533 end-users to see what they needed in order to do their jobs better,” Allen says.
The result was a 662 line-item document saying what the new information sharing system needed to do to be effective in the field. Then Chris Alley, the chief technology architect on the project, along with Allen and his team set about devising a system. It had to be easy-to-use, scalable and function on an open operating platform, to allow new jurisdictions to be added to the system and scaled accordingly. The requirements also enable quick and easy upgrades — from the biggest city to the smallest rural department — by simply upgrading the two centralized redundant data centers.
The data centers are based on IBM iSeries servers running SUSE Linux, IBM DB2 database and Tarantella’s Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition software. Tarantella’s software enables secure remote Web access to information from any platforms to any device, and was thus critical to the open systems approach.
Currently, the system is operating from fixed locations within the three jurisdictions. When the solution is fully deployed, it will provide real-time access from any device with a browser (desktop computer, mobile laptop, PDA) to data and photos. This is extremely powerful public safety information in the hands of first responders who may need to access warrants, mug shots, medical or investigative protocols or any other public safety information.
“Each county is a separate jurisdiction along the coast, and they run along Interstate 10 from one city to the next, so it’s easy for someone to break into a building in an eastern county, drive 30 miles west to another town and pawn what they stole,” Allen explains. “The pawn shops have to report transactions, but it would go into a card file system in a separate jurisdiction from where the crime happened. If that information were available to people in real-time, we could act on it.”
Even arrest warrants were previously kept by each county, so an officer just over the county line might not be aware of an active arrest warrant and would have no way to get that information without the new system.
The system in place now on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast is operational in 13 law enforcement agencies and 15 fire and emergency service agencies. During a test period, each of the original end-users will assess how well it is actually working. Then, the system will undergo its last refinement.
For now, officers and agents in the tri-county area appreciate the system’s capabilities. Additionally, agencies throughout the state are interested in scheduling time to examine the implementation to see if they can tie into it.