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iForce™ Heroes Program Fighting Crime in Real-Time |
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Click below to see: The Human Side of the Internet Delivering Software as a Service A Mobile Sales Infrastructurre Turning Shipping Ports into Data Ports Conclusion: Quality and Reliability
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San Diego
County’s 10,000 police officers owe a lot to Pam Scanlon. Until
three years ago, every time they wanted to check a suspected criminal’s
photo or look up a driver’s license, police officers had to drive
back to their precinct building through the area’s increasingly
heavy traffic and plow through up to 32 different data screens to find
the information they were seeking. Now, they can do their
work directly from a laptop computer stationed in their squad cars.
Thanks to a computer program nicknamed “Yahoo for Cops,” San
Diego police officers can simultaneously search the databases of 38
different state and federal government agencies—from the local
sheriff’s office to the FBI—and retrieve the information they
need in seconds. Their system, formally
known as Infotech, got its start in the mid-1990s when Scanlon, the
executive director of the County’s Automated Regional Justice Information
System (ARJIS), realized that emerging Internet technologies could “give
both citizens and the police the most accurate and timely information”
possible. But in order to make her vision a reality, she had to win
the support of ARJIS’s 38 members—no small feat in a sector
with a traditionally conservative approach to IT. And so Scanlon decide
to proceed in small steps. First, she set up two linked web sites (nicknamed
“Cagney” and “Lacey” after the TV series) providing
a core of crime information to the public and the police. Next, she
added a crime-mapping application to feed nearly real-time information
into the web sites, updating all crime incidents every 24 hours and
emergency services calls every 15 minutes. Finally came two of the
program’s most powerful applications—a database of “booking”
photos of suspected criminals that police could access from their web
browser and a global query system that allowed officers to remotely
extract critical information from the County’s aging mainframe
computers. So successful has the ARJIS system been that two neighboring counties, Los Angeles and Imperial, are considering joining ARJIS. But Scanlon is not resting on her achievements. Her next goals: to link police force radio and voice networks into the system, and to overlay other local databases, like community planning data, to give police a more complete picture of a community’s needs. “At the moment, we have islands of data,” she explains. Piecing this information together, “the Internet will allow the police to be more proactive”—one of the most effective steps yet in the fight against crime. |
