This Isn’t Your Father’s Public Safety System

Back in the 1960s, when Sergeant Friday was sticking with the facts and most officers carried .38 Special revolvers, everyone kept records on paper. While some of the records were typewritten, a fair percentage of them were handwritten. Of course, as the number of crimes increased along with the population, the number of physical records also increased. And, most importantly, officers and clerks were spending more and more of their time physically searching through file cabinets and storage rooms for existing records. In some cases it might take a person several days to find the file in question—something we simply have trouble comprehending today.
 

With the increase in mobility brought about by the newly-built interstate highway system, it was also far easier for people to commit crimes in multiple jurisdictions. Law enforcement in one state might have no idea that someone they were interested in was also being sought elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, criminals took regular advantage of this lack of coordination between agencies.
 

Then, NCIC went live in early 1967 to track wanted people and vehicles nationwide, ushering in the modern age of computerized record-keeping. From that point, it became easy to get access to the information one needed in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. The 1970s and 1980s saw the use of federal block grants to help states, cities, and counties implement computerized systems for managing public safety records.
 

Many of the systems which were originally built in the 1980s are still in service today, though somewhat altered. Unfortunately, while these systems provide better access to data than was available in the days of typewriters and file cabinets, they are not as efficient as they could be.
 

This lack of efficiency is most often evidenced by the systems’ lack of integration. It is still very common to see a records management system (RMS) which does not fully integrate with a jail management system (JMS). There might be an interface between these two systems or applications, but officers may need to manually promote warrant information from the RMS to the JMS to book an inmate. Or, it may be that personal information which is updated for the inmate in the JMS is not available to an officer via a mobile workstation when he or she pulls the former inmate over for a traffic stop a few weeks after release from jail.
 

Interfaces and workarounds are regularly built to attempt to solve these issues, but in many cases the systems are too dissimilar and the data structures so incompatible that there is no way to avoid a fair amount of manual manipulation and redundant data entry.
A better solution to this is to re-engineer all of the pieces of the public safety system (CAD, RMS, JMS, etc) so that they literally share a common database. Information entered on a warrant in the RMS is stored in the database and is directly accessible (no interfaces, no workarounds, no nightly job to run an update) to a corrections officer who is booking an inmate.
 

This is precisely what we have done with ledsSuite. We have learned much from the pioneers in the field of public safety software, but we have crafted a contemporary, highly efficient tool which is geared toward the needs of dispatchers and officers and deputies working today, not 10 or 20 or 30 or more years ago.
 

Let’s see what happens when Sergeant Friday gets some updated equipment. It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon in July. The police station gets a 911 call of an erratic driver. Dispatch creates a Call for Service in ledsCAD. Based on their AVL information, Joe and his partner are in the closest unit to the suspect’s vehicle. They are dispatched immediately. Once they pull over the driver, the officers use ledsMobile CAD to look up the driver’s name. He has an outstanding warrant for armed robbery, based on evidence that was added to ledsRecords a couple of weeks ago. After returning to the precinct and dropping his prisoner and his partner off at the county jail, Joe pulls the squad car under some shade in the parking lot. He goes back into ledsMobile Records and finishes writing up the report. Since the county and the city are using a multi-jurisdictional implementation of ledsSuite, the corrections officer has all the information about the armed robbery suspect at his fingertips in ledsJail when he books the possible felon into the facility fifteen minutes later.
 

If Joe Friday had only managed to get his hands on ledsSuite, he could have wrapped everything up in minutes instead of days.