But that didn't happen this time. The tourist had her jewelry back before she left the state a few days later. Police in Osceola County have free access to all the information in the pawn shop database of nearby Orange County, and that's where the evidence turned up. This was possible because county law enforcement agencies in Florida have established a data-sharing consortium that makes investigations of that sort not only fast but routine.
Such an arrangement doesn't exist yet in most of the country. Fighting crime across city, county and state lines remains a challenging process that often requires "dialing for dollars," says K. Michael Reynolds, a criminal justice professor at the University of Central Florida. Data flowing across borders happens only when systems are set up to make it happen, and while it's increasingly a priority of local law enforcement agencies, there are still a lot of obstacles to getting good information-sharing systems in place.
For many jurisdictions, the idea of pooling data resources as seamlessly as is done in Florida remains a little frightening. Individual agencies are nervous about allowing others free access to their information, even when there's a valid public purpose involved. When different criminal justice agencies do agree to work together, there are a lot of difficult aspects to setting up data sharing across department lines.
It's becoming more and more important, though. Citizens expect more effective responses from crime databases than they did just a couple of years ago. People accustomed to watching "CSI" on television often assume law enforcement officers can sit down at a computer and pull up any relevant information to help them solve the case.
Once a suspect has been arrested, the need for data sharing doesn't stop. Layers upon layer of records follow each criminal through the system, and without processes that adequately transfer key information to corresponding agencies, there is a lot of redundant data entry going on, which means both inefficiency and the potential for errors.
Technology isn't the most serious of the obstacles to exchanging data. IT systems vary from project to project, but lots of networks are making use of applications that translate data from the host database so that it's accessible through the common system. The federal offices that help coordinate state criminal justice planning are pushing for broader use of XML, a language that makes data translation easier across systems (because it provides the cues to translating right within the record fields).
A bigger operational challenge is establishing standards to make the data talk to other systems--and be understood by other systems--at the right times and about the right pieces of information. While law enforcement data sharing usually involves the ability to search others' files, once the criminal is in the system, it's often more useful to have automated information flowing as necessary to the correct agencies when it's cued to do so by certain events.
Without integration, for example, a court might provide hard copies of different versions of a disposition to a number of departments--the prison system, the motor vehicle administration, the sexual offender registry--and each of those would enter that form into its own computer network. With integration, a clerk fills out a single disposition and the network pushes the relevant information to each department electronically, making for less work and fewer errors.
The Massachusetts Parole Department, as part of Governor Mitt Romney's plan to integrate the state's justice networks, is implementing a program to get just such a "push" of information from the courts as an offender enters the corrections system. Other relevant information will be added to that file automatically throughout the course of his stay in prison--and when he's due for a parole hearing, the original booking forms as well as any related data that's accumulated will be right there in the file. The new parole record tracking system, called SPIRIT, is due to be running by late summer.
SETTING STANDARDS
The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, or SEARCH, has been investigating the records "exchanges" that take place in criminal justice systems in 25 different jurisdictions. The end result of that research should be a set of standards that describe elements common across jurisdictional boundaries. This will not only help compare apples to apples between states but also will help agencies within a state work together to "push" and "pull" the right data among themselves as they manage their criminal populations through the courts, corrections facilities and beyond.SEARCH has already participated in compiling a Global Justice XML Data Model and Dictionary, a set of building blocks that should serve as templates of the data-exchange documents and terms that criminal justice agencies use. In Minnesota, where the CriMNet integrated justice system is currently going through a restructuring, the first step has been taking each exchange of data between the state's criminal justice agencies and seeing how it conforms to this national standard.
In Chicago, the CLEAR database used by the city's police force and other agencies in Cook County will soon be integrated with the state police information system, and local officials credit the united support of the governor and the city's mayor with pushing the program through.
But though it's achieved acclaim as a sophisticated and efficient crime-fighting tool, the Chicago model may not be applicable everywhere. CLEAR is a single database for the whole state, and doesn't require the integration of existing individual systems. "The two five-hundred pound gorillas in law enforcement are Chicago and the state," explains Ron Huberman, who helped develop CLEAR and now runs the city's Department of Emergency Management and Communication, "and to have these two saying this will be our new standard, this will be our system," it created enough muscle to convert everyone to a single platform. In more fragmented jurisdictions--more common around the country--achieving something like CLEAR will not be an option.
It might seem easier to get cooperation when all of the participating players reside under one governmental umbrella, but even once a criminal has been apprehended--and entered the justice system of a particular state--there is still wariness among different units of government in working together to automate the process of tracking the offender through the system. Agency and department leaders still don't want to lose control of their own data. What's necessary is coming up with a governance structure and an architecture that makes all players feel like they have some control over the process and their own records.
"The most important thing is the governance structure and agreements up front about how different information owned by each participant will be handled," says Theresa Brandorff, of the Colorado Integrated Criminal Justice Information System. That state's judicial branch interacts with the departments of Corrections, Public Safety and Human Services through CICJIS, one of the more developed integration systems across the country.
THE NEUTRAL ZONE
For the Pegasus Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to facilitate data sharing among sheriff's departments nationwide, the biggest challenge is "taking what's already there and working with the sheriff and the county and their vendors because they don't want anybody messing with it. We have to convince them we're not going to change their system," says Lee Colwell, the foundation's director and a former associate director of the FBI.In some places, public universities are helping to create a neutral zone--an administrative structure that allows agencies to come together and decide how best to share their information without losing autonomy. The data consortium that cracked the Disney World jewelry case was established by the University of Central Florida; 67 local sheriff's offices and police departments currently participate. UCF is working with universities in Alabama, Tennessee, and southern Mississippi to get similar systems off the ground.
In the UCF consortium, each agency can control the amount, type and frequency of data that go into the Web services computer, which is housed locally. No data are shared that have not been designated as open by the host agency. And the system as a whole is protected because it resides on Florida's criminal justice intranet--available exclusively to authorized law enforcement officials.
The Pegasus Program that seeks to help rural sheriffs has taken a step back even from that and functions more as a "pointer." It will show a user that a record exists but will not automatically allow access to that record through the system. Even this more modest form of data-sharing helps eliminate the need to make a lot of phone calls: When a sheriff's office in Alabama was investigating a rape case, the detective used the network to see that there was a rap sheet and mug shot for the suspect in Colorado. A call was placed to Colorado for permission to obtain the detailed records, and the match was made. Under this system, users have to go through a rigid authentication system; in addition to the usual protocols, the program uses fingerprint identification to be sure that the investigator has been approved.
These cross-jurisdictional integration projects demand external security precautions that aren't as relevant once a criminal is in the system. But the public safety implications are severe in both situations--an error in processing one of the multiplicity of forms at some point along the line can lead to embarrassing or dangerous missteps in the handling of suspects, prisoners and parolees.
Colorado's Brandorff points out that integrating that state's criminal justice system has been helpful in keeping better track of convicted sex offenders. Before, they would be told to register only upon leaving the system; now they're flagged immediately upon conviction, and automatic notices go to the offender and to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. "We're not losing them through the cracks," Brandorff says.
