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July 03, 2007
Uniting Efforts: A Data Sharing Solution from VisionTEK
Like many law enforcement agencies throughout the country, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office understood the concept of data sharing and the benefits of doing so. They knew data sharing among law enforcement agencies can greatly help prevent crime, nab criminals, and speed investigations. Their issue wasn’t a desire to share data; but, rather how to do so that was practical and affordable. To help turn the concept of data sharing into reality, the agencies turned to their mobile data software provider VisionTEK. The solution they were told wasn’t an expensive one. It simply meant utilizing more of the capabilities of a solution both were already using: The UNITY Network. It was designed to allow secure communications and secure data sharing among all of its subscribers, no matter where they are located.
The History
For many years, when a deputy from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office or the Boulder County Sheriff’s office ran a criminal check on an individual, the only records that could be returned from their query were from records residing in the State of Colorado databases and FBI databases. The requestor was not able to see information from their agency’s Records Management System (RMS), let alone that of another county. The data sharing solution provided by the UNITY Network allows them to do both - without switching record query applications. Soon, the Douglas County deputies will be able to view a booking record from Boulder minutes after an individual is booked. Boulder County Sheriff Office will have similar query functions against Douglas County’s law enforcement records. The results of this simple but very effective solution is that soon both counties will have real time access to each others data with the goal of reducing investigation time and an improved ability to track offenders across multiple agencies.
The Solution
Over the course of several years now, Boulder County and Douglas County have been on the UNITY Network, a turnkey data sharing security solution which allows qualifying subscribers to receive BOLOs, weather reports and amber alerts. It also allows agencies that have FrontLine messaging to quickly communicate through email and instant messaging to users outside of their agency as well as those in their agency that are logged on to their FrontLine mobile clients.
With the UNITY infrastructure already in place, VisionTEK engineering needed to perform only a few configurations within the Radix Administration tool to create and publish the queries that each agency would allow to be ran against the respective RMS database records. Follow up changes took only minutes to perform; additional queries privileges takes only minutes to perform. The solution has been a success and each agency will soon experience the benefits of saying ‘Yes’ to data sharing with another law enforcement agency, and working with VisionTEK.
“Douglas County and VisionTEK win again,” Division Chief Mike Coleman of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said. “You have to love the great results this kind of efficiency brings…UNITY makes traditional methods of querying an individual no longer an incomplete picture.”
To Learn More about UNITY and Data Sharing
If you wish to learn more about how UNITY can help your agency share its law enforcement records with other agencies, please contact Aaron Swanson, VisionTEK Vice President - Business Development, aswanson@visiontekinc.com, (303) 554-8835 x283.
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