There was a time when police jurisdictions were independent information fiefdoms and a cop working on a jewelry-store heist in Baltimore had no idea that a Philadelphia detective was compiling clues on a suspiciously similar ring of jewelry thieves.
Surprisingly, that time is now. Other than the haphazard use of public computer networks and the telephone, and except for particular high-profile cases, law-enforcement agencies around the country share basic case information only in random ways.
"You can watch TV and see Eddie Murphy punch in a few words in a computer, and out comes everything you would want to know about a case. You'd be surprised to know that that kind of capability is only on TV," says David Wilson, a police detective in the Irving, Texas.
To remedy the inter-department information dearth afflicting local law-enforcement agencies, Wilson's department signed on for a pilot program using the Bastille, a new Web-based service that offers a secure, private network for information sharing and real-time communication among law-enforcement officers.
The Bastille, to be available to all US law-enforcement agencies beginning 1 February, is produced by GTE Enterprise Solutions, a unit of GTE Corp., and was recently unveiled at the 104th annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The system offers secure, encrypted databases accessible only by the law-enforcement agencies that subscribe to the network.
"They pretty much designed it to allow agencies across the US to share information on criminal activity to clear cases, and you only really need to know how to click on a mouse. There are a lot of times we're working on crimes related to cases in other jurisdictions, and we have no idea we're duplicating work - and Bastille will let us put together the pieces of the puzzle much faster," says Wilson.
Specifically, officers can use the Web-based tool to search or post information in the databases concerning criminal activity, suspects with "most-wanted" status, missing or abducted children alerts, sex-offender release notifications, criminal or missing persons photos, and "hot spot" neighborhood maps.
The underlying technology - a sophisticated context-sensitive search and retrieval tool - in Bastille comes from Excalibur Technologies, in Vienna, Virginia.
Excalibur's technology strength is in accurately accessing and retrieving different document data types that reside in a variety of repositories: the Internet, intranets, relational databases, LAN-based information repositories, and digital libraries. In addition to accessing these disparate data sources, Excalibur enables retrieval of information in a variety of forms, such as structured and unstructured text, static text, real time data feeds, images, and video.
In particular, Excalibur relies on a pattern-recognition program and a "semantic network," which is a system that incorporates user-profiling techniques. For example, an officer working on a child-abduction case can indicate this interest in an account that will provide notification when other child-abduction information becomes available across the network.
"A lot of people have the notion that all search engines are created equal, and that couldn't be further from the truth," said Mark Demers, director of marketing at Excalibur. "There's a demand for knowledge-based retrieval systems that incorporate algorithms that look against all kinds of data, not just raw text, but database-stored information, news wire-feed information, and a ton more different data types. By doing this, we can more accurately and precisely sift through the information and save everyone time."
The police department in Irving is betting on these capabilities. "I worked on a particular case that involved a large theft ring where this one individual was stealing equipment in Irving. [I] had a suspect in mind, but didn't have enough to file a case. I happened to hear that Dallas was working on the same case, and it turned out that Arlington and all these other cities were too. Had we known this in the beginning, we could've wrapped it up long before we did," said Wilson, who expects that the Bastille system will be online in Irving's police offices by 1 January.
Eventually, Wilson expects the Bastille system to find its way into patrol cars. "There's no technology reason why that couldn't happen," Wilson said.
