Information+Exchange

Time and again, we hear people lament that they would have done something differently if they had only had more information. Yet, in criminal justice, especially for the field officer, there isn't time for research. The information to make a decision is either available now, or it is not available at all. Information sharing and interoperability are about getting critical information to people who are making critical decisions. Justice system integration falls under two broad categories - data integration like crime and arrest information and voice communications. In this chapter, you will see a few examples of the dire consequences when state and local law enforcement agencies are unable to share information or communicate. There are a variety of reasons for the inability to share information and communicate and most of them stem from the fragmentation of policing in our country. As we saw, this fragmentation is not only technological but in many ways an organizational culture issue. Moreover, there are many practical reasons such as the need to have dedicated primary radio frequencies and issues related to frequency spectrum efficiency. In addition to providing the agency and community with the benefit of increased safety, information sharing can improve decision making at all levels of the criminal justice systems. It can reduce staff and workload by eliminating the need to enter the same information into different systems. Over the long run, increased information sharing and interoperability can make state and local law enforcement more efficient and effective. There are two basic technological ways to overcome the inability to communicate via radio. One involves the installation and use of trunked radio systems and the other involves the installation and the use of a device that trunks disparate systems together. In the case of tactical incident, there is an organization strategy that can migrate some of the communications problems - the Incident Command System. You will look at XML as a means of providing information sharing via IP standards. The ideas surrounding XML as a means of being able to pull only the data an agency needs are fairly new, and the issue of standards and security protocols remain to be completely solved. You will explore four types of agency partnerships. In each of those, there are policy and procedural issues that are often more difficult to surmount than the technical issues.
 * Information Exchange**

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