A cautionary tale of local information sharing
Calhoun County, Alabama recently spent $850,000 on interagency communications equipment, but so far only one local police department uses it and the system is the source of significant tension among law enforcement officials across the county; poor communication, proprietary databases, and high costs have effectively prevented the county from creating an information sharing system for local law enforcement; each police department uses laptops tied to different servers with different information on them, and though each system was designed to share information, none of the departments’ databases can communicate with one another due to proprietary data and non-compatible physical infrastructure
Calhoun County, Alabama recently spent $850,000 on interagency communications equipment, but so far only one local police department uses it and the system is the source of significant tension among law enforcement officials across the county.
The Jacksonville police department recently switched to a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management system. Instead of using their radios for dispatch calls, officers now use their laptops to respond to calls and pull up an individual’s relevant case history, prior arrests, and other pertinent information.
Officers can also access text, photo, and video data with their laptop using a wireless connection.
Jacksonville police corporal James Clayton says, “Now you have access to a lot of information on people at your fingertips.”
“But the problem is other agencies in the county can’t see … and their information isn’t on here,” he said.
The Jacksonville CAD system operates on an entirely different platform from the $850,000 interagency communications network that was purchased, illustrating the difficulties of information sharing at the local level.
Currently the various law enforcement agencies in Calhoun County are using laptops tied to different servers with different information. Each of these systems was designed with interagency information sharing capabilities in mind, but due to proprietary data, different physical infrastructure, and miscommunication none of these networks can share data.
At the heart of this technological debacle were differing visions for mobile data between the county sheriff and the local police chiefs. The main points of contention were wireless communications or radio data transmissions, commercial networks or locally owned infrastructure, and proprietary commercial databases or public databases.
These decisions were further complicated by the poor relationship between Calhoun County sheriff Larry Amerson and his police chiefs, who have hardly spoken in sixteen years.
Amerson said, “Our communication has not been good. We are all fighting to make our agencies more effective; we don’t necessarily agree on the same paths to that goal.”
After the county received $850,000 from the federal government, Amerson and the police chiefs began advocating for two different systems that were both designed to share information.
Amerson pushed for a system that used existing radio towers to install a countywide 800 megahertz radio system. He saw this as the start of a Northeast Alabama regional mobile database where any law enforcement agency could cheaply connect to the network.
The plan was eventually approved by the county commissioners, despite the objections of the local police chiefs. Amerson is currently in the process of installing the
