Note
At head of title: Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative, a project of the RAND Corporation, the Police Executive Research Forum, RTI International, and the University of Denver.
Summary
"Law enforcement agencies increasingly demand sophisticated information technology (IT) capabilities to support their operations. These capabilities depend on records management systems (RMSs), which maintain agencies’ case histories, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems, which maintain agencies’ calls for service and call response histories. There are also increasing demands to share information with regional, state, and federal repositories of criminal justice information. While substantial progress has been made in improving the information-sharing ability and affordability of key law enforcement systems, many barriers remain. This report reviews progress to date, the sizable barriers remaining, and approaches to overcoming those barriers. Substantial progress has been made on developing information-sharing standards among RMSs and CAD and other key systems, as well as the infrastructure for developing and using standards—notably, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), Global Reference Architecture (GRA), and IJIS Institute’s Springboard compliance testing initiative. Progress also has been made on developing repositories of shared law enforcement information at the federal, state, and regional levels and on developing common policies and request-for-proposal (RFP) language. Finally, there are strategies to improve systems’ affordability, including comparatively inexpensive off-the-shelf systems, shared licensing schemes in which agencies in a region share systems, and software-as a service/cloud migration models in which a third party hosts and maintains the software and hardware but the agency still controls and owns the data."--Abstract.