"Policing Terror"
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 20:45 Federal Computer Week (11/13/06) Vol. 20, No. 39, P. 21; Moore, John
A recent report from Rand, called "Unconquerable Nation: Knowing our Enemies, Strengthening Ourselves," emphasizes the important role local police can play in homeland security beyond serving as first responders. In the Los Angeles area, local and federal agencies have put together a Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC) based on a Memex intelligence management and analysis system to track leads and information from all over a seven-county region. Such a solution can be difficult to scale when organizations begin linking to additional information sources, but JRIC is working around this problem through in-house replication of databases of interest. A similar system has been launched by the Louisiana State Police for counterterrorism and crime investigation, called the Louisiana Fusion and Analytical Center and put together by Apogen Services and based on Microsoft .NET and an SQL Server database. The system brings in incident information from police who contact the center, enabling state police to review leads and assign them to investigators with the help of an automated workflow script. Another component of the Fusion Center enables analysts to search multiple data sources with a single search. Another region that has put together this sort of system is the Seattle region, where the Law Enforcement Information Exchange Northwest has put together a data warehouse full of information from local and state agencies, with Northrop Grumman as contractor. Putting such systems into place involves more than just deploying the IT: there are also cultural, policy, and human-resources issues that have to be overcome in order for the systems to be a success.
