The city’s overhauled 911 system is beset by delays and errors that could leave callers without help for crucial seconds in an emergency, while the fire and police departments aren’t collaborating on how to handle a surge in calls from a massive crisis such as a terrorist attack, a report said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office released an edited version of a consultants’ report on Friday. His administration is fighting legal efforts to force it to release earlier versions. When the New York Post first wrote about the report last month, it described a 216-page document, but the version released Friday had 133 pages.

Cas Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, said the city would immediately adopt two of the report’s 14 recommendations and would soon adopt others. Bloomberg will create a working group to consider the report’s suggestions and will issue an executive order establishing an ongoing process to improve the system, Holloway said.

The deputy mayor argued that, while the report had exposed weaknesses in the call system, the city’s overall response to emergencies had improved.

“Public safety response, I think it’s safe to say, is better than it’s ever been,” he said. “Fire deaths are at an all-time low, and if you look at multiple alarm fires … they’re down 20 percent in the last year, which means we’re getting to fires faster and we’re getting them out.”

The report, initially prepared by outside consultants hired by the city, found that call operators waste time on duplicative questions and employ inconsistent questioning procedures. The system, it found, sends some responders to the wrong address and slows fire and medical dispatchers’ efforts to give instructions to callers.

The report follows a yearslong overhaul of the system that included a new $680 million call center that combined the operations of police, fire and medical dispatchers. City officials have said the update improved response times, eliminated inefficiencies and reduced confusion for callers, but Friday’s report seemed to call some of that into question.

“Statistical information provided to City Hall management to demonstrate the success of the (Unified Call Taking) project contained errors and does not provide a clear picture of the effectiveness of UCT related business processes,” the report said. Holloway said that comment referred largely to the city’s practice of not tracking how long it takes from the moment an emergency call is placed until the moment responders are dispatched.

The report called on the city to instead calculate response times starting with the moment a person calls 911 and ending with the arrival of units on the scene. Holloway said the city was already looking into changing its emergency response time calculations and was moving in the direction suggested in the report.

The Uniformed Firefighters Association has been pressing in court for the release of earlier drafts of the report. The city has appealed a judge’s ruling that it must release those documents as part of a union arbitration.

On Friday, the union in a statement accused the city of releasing “a radically slimmed down and condensed version” of the consultant’s review and said it would pursue its case.

Holloway said that he had never seen a 216-page version of the report and said that it seemed clear the administration wasn’t trying to hide the consultants’ criticisms.

“If the city wanted to put out a sanitized report about the 911 system, this wouldn’t be it,” he said.

The consultants also found instances in which the city’s fire and police departments failed to work together. The agencies developed their plan to deal with a surge of calls in a crisis without collaborating, even though such an incident usually requires a multi-agency response, the report said. Additionally, the fire department’s emergency medical managers weren’t involved in developing procedures for police operators who now handle medical calls.

“NYPD call takers did not receive adequate training for (Unified Call Taking) responsibilities and are not proficient at handling FDNY related activity,” said the report, which also found that fire dispatch personnel were inadequately trained.

Original article.

While compiling statistics for Tulare Police Department, Senior Management Analyst Melody Tucker says accuracy is a must.

“You have to know you produce valid data,” she said. “That information must be reliable. It has to be accurate.”

Faulty information can send law enforcement agencies the wrong direction when dealing with a crime wave or be late in reallocating resources to handle hard-to-spot trends.

“It’s not what you want when you’re running a law enforcement agency,” Tucker said.

Tulare police’s record division keeps data generated by the department. Maintaining statistics and producing reports is just one of the division’s functions.

Tucker said statistics reports for the department help provide the definitive proof trends spotted by officers.

“They know what’s going on,” she said. “My job is to give facts of what they know instinctively.

But the local department is not the lone agency using statistics compiled by Tulare police.

There are up 70 federal, state and local agencies, including Tulare fire and city departments, that use the statistical information produced, Tucker said. And the information goes from reported crimes to traffic accidents and from arrests made to the numbers of vehicles stored or impounded.

“They rely on us to provide the data they need,” she said.

The agencies receiving the data include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which receives statistics from every enforcement agency throughout the nation to spot crime trends nationwide, and the city’s engineering department, completing traffic flow study at busy intersections.

Other agencies that receive the department’s data include schools and the military, mainly background checks and information.

“The FBI’s trend is based on what we report to them,” she said.

Requests for statistical information can come at any time. Media organizations or state agencies are frequent solicitors, Tucker said.

Tucker said she and her staff seek to fulfill request expeditiously.

“We try to be flexible,” she said. “We try to do those as quickly as we can.”

However, there is a mandatory monthly statistics report due to the Department of Justice. Tucker said the monthly report is due 10 days after the first of the month, giving her one last chance to review the numbers before being sent off.

On average, Tulare police takes 300 Part I crimes reports monthly. Part I crimes include homicide, sexual assault, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny and auto theft.

Depending on what kind they are, reports can including booking forms, restraining order and lengthy incident narrative. All components must be included.

Besides the monthly report to DOJ, Tulare police’s record division is also audited by state officials, depending on auditors’ availability, yearly.

Last year, Tulare police’s record division was audited.

And while some division managers might dread a fine-tooth comb look at their work, Tucker says she enjoys the end result. An audit completed in April and looking at five elements rendered positive feedback for Tucker.

“That felt really good,” she said.

While information sharing in law enforcement isn’t (in the grand scheme of things) a new concept, it is still a new territory of understanding for many. Even with the Bureau of Justice Assistance tremendous efforts of making informational resources and training available to public safety, learning about the maze of IEDP’s, JIEM, and NIEM can be challenging for those first learning about getting law enforcement records systems to connect across the boundaries of jurisdiction and technology.   Through this brief article we’re here to help.

If your agency is interested in sharing information, connecting to other jurisdictions records, and having the ability to query other law enforcement data systems, there are 2 ways to go about it: 1) buy a new RMS system that has these features built-in (compatible with the alphabet soup) or 2) tweak your current system. Both of these options are quite involved and how to go about doing either is not the focus of this article (remember, we’re keeping this simple for you).   Either way, having an understanding of the technology behind being able to search local agency records for names, license plates, phone numbers, addresses, property, tattoos, or other specific personally identifiable information will enable you to make informed decisions. So what does it all mean?

If your agency is in the market for a new RMS or integrated CAD/RMS/MFR system, chances are the system is alphabet soup compatible. However, this is not a certainty and it is imperative to get hard and fast proof (solidified in the contract) that the system is based on Global Reference Architecture (GRA) and conforms to the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

If on the other hand you are interested in getting your current system into the information sharing age, inter-jurisdictionally speaking, you’ll first need an understanding of what this all means.

NIEM: A national information exchange model used to connect information between public safety agencies. It uses extensible markup language (XML) that allows for a standardized or common vocabulary used in the exchange of information between differing agencies and their systems. NIEM is a holistic set of resources and computer language that can be reused as necessary in information sharing projects including training, governance, methodologies and technical assistance.

GJXML: Global Justice Extensible Markup Language. A standard computer programming language which describes how information is structured or classified so that the information itself can be shared among differing computer systems and platforms.

JIEM: A model to utilize in the process of determining an agency’s information sharing business processes. It is a structured and standardized approach for identifying information exchange requirements for an agency. This process produces sets of information exchanges which are common to public safety agencies that can be reused and built upon for the unique needs of each agency. JIEM is somewhat of a sub-component of NIEM

IEPD: Information Exchange Package Documentation. A specification for a particular data exchange and its definition. It is a “package” of information that describes a particular process such as an Amber Alert or the booking of an offender. It includes the business process of the information exchange, a data model, and documentation describing the particular exchange of information. These are standard packages of information common to policing designed to allow interoperability amongst data sharing systems. They come in the form of a compressed file that when opened reveal all of these components.

In conclusion, if you’re in need of updating your current system to allow for interoperability with other agency’s data there are a number of resources to turn to.  Download these guides to familiarize yourself with NIEM, JIEM, GRA and consider utilizing the technical resources of experts in this area who can assist.

See our other articles here.

The FBI’s decision to reaffirm that all cloud products sold to U.S. law enforcement agencies must comply with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Systems security requirements gives momentum to cloud computing becoming the key catalyst in the world of security, privacy and data protection.

And there are good reasons for vendors to make the effort. Public safety organizations are now dealing with more information than ever before. And quite frankly it’s becoming cost prohibitive for them to store and maintain.

For example, cloud storage enables large amounts of electronic information to be hosted by third parties that have the capacity. There are huge significant benefits – cost savings.  Beyond not having to pay for the physical space to host the servers where all the data resides, public safety organizations no longer have to shoulder the responsibility on ensuring the hardware and software are operating and up-to-date. They also no longer have to dedicate as many personnel to maintain IT systems.

Okay, so let’s just get the two biggest “why cloud computing isn’t right for law enforcement and public safety organizations” arguments out of the way right now:

I lose control of my information.
Not true. In fact, the cloud can assist police departments in ensuring only those who are supposed to access the information have the secret handshake to get past the guards at the virtual gates. That said, some of the onus of who accesses what still falls to the content owner. Organizations must be thoughtful about their ability to control the data managed by the cloud provider and ensure that authorized users across their organization have access to the data and tools that they need, when they need it—all while blocking unauthorized access.

With cloud environments typically built to support a large and diverse community of users, these controls are even more critical. In addition, clouds introduce a new tier of privileged users: administrators working for the cloud provider. Privileged-user monitoring, including logging activities, becomes an important requirement. This monitoring should include security fundamentals such as physical monitoring and background checking.

Certainly, cloud computing has become a catalyst in the world of security, privacy and data protection. It is driving the open standards process and the modernization of data centers which will ultimately help support better security and privacy initiatives. Cloud computing also allows for more flexible IT acquisition and improvement by organizations so they can adjust the cloud environment according to the sensitivity of the data.

It’s not secure.
Again, not true. In fact, we believe clouds have the potential to be secure than most traditional environments. However, cloud service providers must deliver security and privacy expectations that meet or exceed what is available in traditional IT environments. They must do this in the same way transformational technologies of the past overcame concerns, such as PCs, outsourcing, and the Internet.

What we’re really talking about is securing the data put into clouds. Clouds are purpose built and designed to accomplish specific tasks.  It’s this purpose built attribute that can make locking down this environment more effective than trying to secure a traditional network which has been built over many years based on different and competing business priorities.

If configured appropriately and adjusted as needed, clouds are healthy, secure environments. Security is an ongoing process. Additionally, analytics can be delivered through a cloud, making it easier for departments to scale up and down based on need.

And the reality is that you could make the argument that the cloud is already being utilized by police agencies across the nation. Case in point: the FBI’s Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, (N-DEx).

As a national information-sharing system available through a secure Internet site for law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, N-DEx enables agencies to search and analyze data using some powerful automated capabilities, helping to connect the dots between people, places, and events.

N-DEx has become an invaluable tool is fighting crime across multiple jurisdictions because it allows law enforcement officials to:

• Conduct nationwide searches from a single access point;
• Search by “modus operandi” and for clothing, tattoos, associates, cars, etc.—linking    individuals, places, and things;
• Receive notifications of similar investigations and suspects;
• Identify criminal activity hotspots and crime trends.

Like N-DEx, COPLINK from IBM organizes vast quantities of seemingly unrelated data to provide tactical, strategic and command-level users with access to shared data in a single, or multiple, consolidated repositories. Its proven ability to quickly identify investigative leads helps agencies solve crimes faster, thereby helping to keep officers and communities safer. Additionally, COPLINK enables information sharing initiatives across regional, statewide and national agencies by providing rapid, simultaneous search across multiple COPLINK sites and external data sources.

N-DEx and COPLINK are both excellent examples of law enforcement agencies taking a significant step towards taking better advantage of Web-based solutions to fight crime across multiple jurisdictions. Given how quickly we seem to be gathering and consuming data, broader and smarter cloud solutions are just around the corner to ensure we’re doing all we can to reduce our budgets and protect our citizens.

Original article

City officials say better training for law enforcement and clerical workers has already remedied some of the problems.

CHICAGO — State records show data on traffic accidents in the Chicago area is often flawed or incomplete, which hinders decisions on how to spend money for safety-related fixes within the metropolis, a city-led study concluded.

More than 70 percent of Chicago Police Department crash reports were missing important data, and details such as street names or proximity to intersections frequently misreported, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation, which conducted the research at the city’s request in 2008.

Other inaccuracies include “deaths underreported by as much as 179 percent” and a volume of angle crashes associated with running red lights inflated by one third, which the study attributed to faulty city data being taken at face value.

“The Illinois Department of Transportation validates each of the reports with software and manually to ensure that the coded data on the report corresponds with the narrative provided by the law enforcement reporting agency,” the research report said. “The Chicago Police Department, however, enters the crash data exactly as it appears in the hard copy of the crash report.”

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“In 2006, for example, they said the city counted 63 traffic deaths in Chicago while a state database they considered far more accurate put the number at 176 deaths. That same year, records show, the city reported 1,594 victims of serious injuries in crashes in Chicago; the state pegged it at 3,337.

“At the same time, city numbers for some key crash categories were far higher than the state’s. The city count in 2006 for crashes involving pedestrians was 4,945, compared with 3,909 totaled by the state. For angle crashes, the city total in 2006 was 24,576, the state 16,392.”

City officials say better training for law enforcement and clerical workers who analyze data — and an upgraded accident form — should help correct the problems.  A spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation said he has seen improvements since implementing the changes.

“Without accurate data on the seriousness of the injury and relation of the crash to the intersection, the crash rate calculations and prioritization will be erroneous, and could result in the misdirection of funds,” read the city’s grant application.

Local law enforcement agencies interested in jumping on the electronic reporting bandwagon can now do it for free in Kansas.

The Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP) has developed a four-part integrated data solution that combines field reporting, records management, electronic ticketing and court management functionality. To encourage use of the system, the KHP is picking up the tab for up to three concurrent licenses for each local police department in the state that wants to try it.

So what’s the catch? Law enforcement agencies have to use the KHP’s proprietary field reporting application and users must agree to submit reports electronically to the state. The combination of integrated software platforms is called the KLER Justice Solution.

Local police will receive free access to the field reporting and records management portions of the system for two years. They’ll be billed a small annual fee for their concurrent licenses after that. The charge will be collected by Global Software, the vendor of the records management system (RMS) portion of the project.

The system’s other two pieces — FullCourt Enterprise, a court solution provided by Justice Systems Inc., and digiTICKET, the electronic citation component — are available to local agencies at a reduced cost.

Project History

The system’s field reporting module was rolled out in early 2010, followed by the new RMS.

Mark Thurman, CIO of the KHP, said the primary goals of the integrated Justice Solution project were to provide local law enforcement agencies the ability to go paperless by using KLER and get reports submitted to the state electronically which saves money.

Other priorities, according to Thurman, were to give officers secure access to shared data, build efficiency through system integration, and add a suite of technology components that would extend from a patrol car through agency review and onto state agencies in Kansas.

“The idea was to be able to capture the data once and use it whenever and wherever we need it,” Thurman said. “The goal was to make it generic enough to not only be used by the Highway Patrol, but by any law enforcement agency in Kansas.”

The entire project was financed using federal grants.

Getting an integrated system online for use by hundreds of law enforcement agencies hasn’t been easy task. It took IT staff roughly nine months to integrate the field reporting module with the new RMS system just to get the KHP running on the technology. That made repeating the process for roughly 450 local law enforcement agencies in Kansas a daunting prospect.

According to Thurman, there were a variety of issues that had to be resolved, including how to accommodate unique data configurations used by individual police departments.

“We needed a plan to shorten that [timeframe] and we’re in the process of completing an online mechanism for them to basically start providing us that information,” he said, adding that training on the system also will be done on the Web through a short user guide and individual instruction on the operation of each individual module in the KLER Justice Solution.

Interest Is High

With the data-sharing requirements and preparation work necessary to get on the system, one might assume interest would be mild from local police departments. But Thurman said that hasn’t been the case.

He explained that most law enforcement agencies in Kansas are made up of 12 officers or less, and many departments don’t have electronic reporting technology at all. So the opportunity to get the latest technology for free has been popular.

In addition, even though some of the bigger departments may have their own RMS or reporting technology in place already, the KHP solution is cheaper.

“Even in these larger entities, under the contract I put in place, they are going to pay less to get in on this hosted solution than what they currently are paying for maintenance now on their own,” Thurman explained.

Aside from the financial considerations, Thurman said changing attitudes about data have helped the project.

“Two years ago, nobody wanted to share their data [and] now they will,” he said. “It’s a nice trend that I’ve seen. [Local police departments] see the value in it when I say ‘the Highway Patrol is putting their data out there,’ so for better and safer policing, it just makes good sense.”

Original Article

Police and sheriff’s departments usually stand together on the same side of the law.

But the two groups are at odds over SB 411, a bill that would create a Sheriff’s Cooperative Authority in charge of setting up a computerized database of law enforcement records.

Anything from warrants and jail booking records to sheriff’s arrest reports would then be available to the public for a “reasonable fee.” Profits from fees would be used to operate the authority or to invest in training deputies. Backers of the bill have not yet determined how much money it might bring in or how much to charge for public access.

Terry Norris, executive director of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, said the authority would benefit the public by making sheriff’s records more accessible.

See original article here.

11:27 a.m. EDT, March 14, 2012

For the one millionth time, a Pennsylvania State Police trooper issued an “electronic” traffic citation, using computer technology that improves trooper safety and cuts in half the amount of time it used to take a trooper to issue a citation manually.

“This milestone highlights joint Pennsylvania Supreme Court and Pennsylvania State Police initiatives to apply technology to improve court efficiency and also increase trooper safety by providing quicker access to outstanding warrants,” said Chief Justice of Pennsylvania Ronald D. Castille. “No paper is filed in the courts, eliminating the need for officers to deliver the traffic citations to the district courts and for court staff to enter citation information manually into the state judiciary’s computer system. This is estimated to save court staff 77,000 hours annually.”

“When driver’s license and registration information is entered into a trooper’s mobile data terminal, state and national databases are automatically checked to determine whether outstanding warrants exist for the driver or whether the vehicle has been reported stolen,” said Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan. “The driver’s license and registration data is then auto-populated into the traffic citation form, which cuts the time in half for the trooper issuing a citation–thus allowing the trooper to get back on the road more quickly and resume duties.”

The traffic citation data that law enforcement officers enter into on-board computers in police cruisers is electronically sent to the Magisterial District Judge System through the Pennsylvania Justice Network (JNET). The Pennsylvania State Police began issuing traffic citations electronically in 2010, and more recently, Washington (Franklin County) and East Buffalo (Union County) townships police departments, Shippensburg Borough Police, (Cumberland/Franklin County) and the Southwest Mercer County Regional Police Department began issuing electronic traffic citations.

The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts’ Judicial Automation staff tested the computer system that is used by a large number of local police departments to develop a traffic citation e-filing system for these departments. Additional local police departments are expected to implement e-filing of traffic citations in the future. In 2011, more than 1.6 million traffic citations were issued statewide by state and local police. (See recently released case filing reports at www.pacourts.us/Reports.)

In addition to the electronic filing of traffic citations, Allegheny County has developed a model system to allow criminal complaints to be filed electronically, further eliminating the need for court staff to manually enter criminal complaint data into the court system. Other counties have expressed interest in implementing similar capabilities for criminal complaints.

The millionth traffic citation was issued on Sunday, March 11. Neither the alleged offender nor the county where the ticket was issued will be revealed.

Original article

BRATTLEBORO — The Vermont Supreme Court ruled Friday that police dispatch logs are not exempt from the state’s public records act.

Stephen Bain, who was convicted of possessing stolen property and marijuana in 2005, had sued to get dispatch and unit logs from Windham County Sheriff Keith Clark. The lower court had dismissed the suit, saying the records were exempt from disclosure because they dealt with “the detection and investigation of a crime.”

But the Supreme Court on Friday reversed that decision and sent the case back to Windham Superior Court in Newfane.

“We cannot assume, consistent with the purpose of the PRA, that simply because the records at issue were generated by a law enforcement agency, they necessarily are records ‘dealing with the detection and investigation of a crime,’” the court said in its unanimous decision.

Bain had filed a number of lawsuits against Clark and others, including Windham County State’s Attorney Tracy Shriver, saying police had unlawfully entered his home after his May 2003 arrest. All the lawsuits were dismissed.

In 2004, his attorney sought state police and sheriff radio log, dispatcher log, computer log and any other computer generated or automobile related logs from May 22 and May 23, 2003.

Bain said he requested the documents from Clark but got no response.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Clark argued that the documents fell under the detection and investigation of a crime exemption in the public records act which includes “records maintained on any individual or complied in the course of a criminal or disciplinary investigation by any police or professional licensing agency.”

But according to the Public Records Act, records relating to the management and direction of a law enforcement agency and records reflecting the initial arrest of a person and the charge shall be public.

Windham Superior Court Judge John Wesley dismissed Bain’s complaints and granted Clark’s motion from injunctive relief, declaring Bain a “vexatious litigant” barring him from continuing to sue Clark for claims from his 2005 conviction without first getting the court’s approval.

Bain appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court.

On Friday, the justices said since they didn’t know what was in the records, or if they even exist, they could not determine if they were exempt.

“Assuming these radio dispatch and unit logs do exist, we cannot discern from the record precisely what information they might contain. We thus cannot determine if they are records ‘dealing with the detection and investigation of crime’ and therefore exempt from disclosure …” wrote the court.

“We are thus left to wonder, do these records exist?” wrote the court. “If not, why haven’t defendants relied on this position to defeat Bain’s claim? If they do exist, why did the Sheriff’s Office say otherwise in 2004?

“Assuming these radio dispatch and unit logs do exist, we cannot discern from the record precisely what information they might contain,” continued the court. “We thus cannot determine if they are records ‘dealing with the detection and investigation of crime’ and therefore exempt from disclosure … We cannot assume, consistent with the purpose of the PRA, that simply because the records at issue were generated by a law enforcement agency, they necessarily are records ‘dealing with the detection and investigation of crime.’ To so hold would allow for a ‘potentially limitless’ exemption.”

As the Legislature intended, wrote the court, the PRA must be “liberally construed with the view towards carrying out” its legislative purpose of allowing “free and open examination of records ….”

Clark said he had not read the decision and therefore could not comment. A lawyer representing him could not be reached for comment. Shriver also had no comment on the decision.

Dan Barrett, staff attorney for the Vermont Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court ruled that to determine whether a record needs to be kept from public view, a judge needs to actually see the records and decide on a case-by-case basis.

He said this is the first time in the history of the Public Records Act that the exemption dealing with detection and investigation of crimes has been interpreted.

“The defendants were saying all this stuff is off limits and nobody can have it,” said Barrett. “But the Supreme Court said no.”

The court ruled it’s up to the trial court, not the agency holding the records, to determine if they hold information that might endanger an investigation, imperil informants or hinder the state’s ability to prosecute a crime.

The Supreme Court’s decision might indicate how it could rule in other public records cases it is hearing, most notably Galloway v. Hartford and two suits filed by the Rutland Herald.

“The court’s decision shuts down the idea that there is a blanket exemption for law enforcement records,” said Barrett.

“This is a great decision for transparency and police accountability,” said Allen Gilbert, executive director of the ACLU of Vermont. “We are glad that the court recognized that withholding police records from the public is the exception and not the rule in Vermont.”

Attorney General Bill Sorrell, whose office helped defend Clark, said he was happy with the decision, because it prevents the disclosure of records that could affect an investigation. However, it also cleared up a gray area in the PRA.

“If there is no confidential information in the records or you are not protecting the people’s privilege or prejudicing the investigation, they should be released,” said Sorrell.

Secretary of State Jim Condos was also happy with the Supreme Court’s decision.

“This decision is good for Vermont and its good for its citizens,” he said. “They didn’t buy the catchall that everything falls under the detection and investigation of a crime exemption.”

Reformer staffer Bob Audette contributed to this report.  Original Article.