NCJ Number
214871
Journal
Police Chief Volume: 73 Issue: 6 Dated: June 2006 Pages: 32,34,36
Date Published
June 2006
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This article describes a new program of information sharing among public safety agencies that builds upon existing structures and activities.
Abstract
In 2005, the U.S. Justice Department's National Institute of Justice awarded a grant to the San Diego Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) for the purpose of developing a toolkit for information sharing not previously available across State lines. This toolkit will be used by agencies in the course of enhancing, building, or linking information or intelligence systems. The first phase of this project--called the State, Regional, and Federal Enterprise Retrieval Systems (SRFERS)--resulted in the development of a prototype application that allows simultaneous searches of regional information in Arizona and California in order to obtain data and photos from out-of-State databases. ARJIS partnered with other existing information systems to develop the application. These included the Maricopa County Integrated Criminal Justice Information Systems (ICJIS) and the International Justice and Public Information Sharing Network (Nlets). The new information sharing application was made possible by the existing features of the participating information systems. The SRFERS application consists of three basic software components: a client, the broker, and data providers. The communication flow begins when the client sends a search request to the broker. The broker looks at the type of request and the search region specified. It compares these to its list of data providers and then transmits the request to each data provider in accordance with the nature of the request. Responses from each data provider are routed back to the client through the broker and displayed to the user. The data sources available through SRFERS include booking photos, data on persons and vehicles of interest, and license-plate reader data.