A cautionary tale of local information sharing
56K modems in police cars and antennas, and once completed any law enforcement agency can use it to transmit data and photos.
The sheriff also plans on creating a regional database that stores all the information and records compiled by law enforcement agencies in a central server at the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office. The new database will automatically search through the joint records system and give an officer a suspect’s complete profile and case history when a name is entered into the system.
“We don’t have a way, sitting here today, to query a database to determine if there’s been a robbery (that another agency is investigating) whose suspect is a white female who didn’t have a weapon,” the sheriff said. “It’s inefficient and ineffective to get information out the way that we do.”
Installation is expected to be completed by early March.
So far only one agency has opted into Amerson’s system and the rest of the police chiefs have staunchly opposed his plan every step of the way.
When the county sheriff first proposed the plan, the police chiefs sent a letter to the county commissioners arguing that the money should not be spent on a system that runs on 56K modems and other technology that is more than ten years old. Instead, they suggested that the $850,000 grant should be used to purchase the same CAD system that Jacksonville is currently using for every agency in the county.
They believed that Jacksonville’s system was superior as the only hardware costs were the purchase of inexpensive Verizon air cards to connect to the database’s 3G wireless network.
“We can’t afford to go back to an obsolete system just to hook up with him (Amerson),” Oxford Police chief Bill Partridge added.
“We could have all gone to the system Jacksonville has now … every agency in the county could have been outfitted with that,” Partridge said.
Proprietary data is another major setback to Amerson’s plan. To join his system local police departments would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to allow the companies currently managing their data to relinquish their control over it and connect it with the system.
The Anniston police department had initially agreed to sign on to Amerson’s network, but backed out after learning that it would have to pay thousands of dollars to Application Data Systems Inc. (ADSi), the department’s records-management vendor, to use their data on a separate system.
Instead, Anniston opted to purchase Verizon Wireless air cards and install ADSi software on laptops to give officers mobile access to the database.
Both the county sheriff and the local police chiefs agree that the current dispute over data sharing systems has been exacerbated by “bad blood” between them effectively prevented the county from creating a county-wide data system.
Jacksonville police chief Tommy Thompson along with Partridge and Wineman cannot recall the last time they even spoke with the Amerson, who agreed with their statement.
The sheriff says that he stopped speaking with most of the local police chiefs after they failed to show up to interagency meetings he held sixteen years ago when he was first elected.
Wineman said, “The relationship has gone downhill for years. There’s a major disconnect in law enforcement.”
