Ohio police use specialized software to track data (and bad guys)

Computerworld - Almost 1,000 police departments in Ohio have found critical new crime-fighting tools by gaining access to the digital records kept by neighboring law enforcement agencies.

Since December, the Ohio attorney general's office has been working to link local police departments and their criminal records with a statewide data interoperability effort.

The Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway Search Engine (OHLEG-SE) was created by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro to help expand state and local crime-fighting resources. OHLEG-SE is an Internet-based tool that can securely comb through numerous crime databases using a single log-in and query, making it easier to use than separate crime databases.

For police officers, searching for information on a suspect or a rash of crimes used to require manually logging into several separate crime databases -- a process that could take hours.

Now, officers in even the smallest communities can log in just once and quickly gain access to criminal information in the OHLEG-SE.

The project, which began in 2003, faced a major hurdle: finding a way to get the disparate crime information systems to interoperate with each other. One goal of the OHLEG-SE was to allow each police department to use the software it wants while setting standards software vendors could use to make their products compatible with rival products.

"Everybody wants to share, but nobody wants to use the same product," said Chief Gary Vest of the Powell, Ohio, Police Department, near Columbus. In a major metropolitan area in Ohio, there can be 30 different police departments, each using different products that aren't linked, he said. That made it difficult for local departments to link suspects and crimes in neighboring jurisdictions, he said.

To make the systems compatible, crime records management vendors rewrote their software so data from participating departments could be converted into the OHLEG-SE format for easier sharing of data, he said. The vendors use a special object-oriented Global Justice XML Data Model and interoperability standards from the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, which was developed by the U.S. Department of Justice for such purposes.

What makes the OHLEG-SE different from other fledgling police interoperability programs in the U.S., Vest said, is that it's a standards-based system. "You don't have to throw out your vendor to play," he said.

OHLEG-SE is not yet linked to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database operated by the FBI, but that is expected eventually. The NCIC database is one of the most commonly used in the country. So far, OHLEG-SE can't search on criminal "M.O.'s" but that capability is being worked on, Vest said. By combing local police records, officers can search for a suspect's name even before it's in the national NCIC database or other larger data repositories, he said. "You're a step earlier."