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Exchange links criminal data across S.C.
By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer
John Bradham knows firsthand how valuable information sharing can be to law enforcement.
When his car was stolen a few years ago in North Charleston, information about the crime was collected and put into a database per standard police procedure. However, when the thief was pulled over in another county, there was nothing to indicate that the car was stolen.
That gap in information delayed recovery of the vehicle and could have allowed a crook to slip through their fingers.
“The information on my car was only available in the database in North Charleston, and law enforcement officials in other areas didn’t have access,” said the senior vice president of the South Carolina Research Authority. “Today, if someone steals a car or commits any kind of crime, police all over the state can know about it immediately because of this system.”
The system Bradham referred to is the South Carolina Information Exchange, developed by the Integrated Solutions Group, an SCRA affiliate, along with the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center–Southeast, which is housed at SCRA’s Lowcountry facility.
The information exchange program evolved out of the Lowcountry Information Technology Improvement Project, comprised of a coalition of police chiefs and sheriffs from the tri-county area and managed by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology
Center–Southeast, Bradham said.
“That was a common records management system, like a central warehouse for data-sharing between agencies,” Bradham said. “It was definitely an asset for law enforcement.”
Then late last year, the State Law Enforcement Division began looking for a means of information management sharing.
“They looked at the ITIP program here and thought that was exactly what they needed, so they contracted with us,” he said. “The name of the program was changed to SCIEx when SLED took over, but it’s essentially what we were doing with ITIP.”
Al Johnson, who is both the director of Public Safety & Homeland Security Solutions for SCRA and the director of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center–Southeast, said the SCIEx system has become a model for law enforcement information management.
“South Carolina is the only state that has a system working statewide,” he said. “We have approximately 188 agencies within the state that are replicating the data and about 190 within the state accessing the data and using it in criminal investigations such as locations of persons and intelligence cross-referencing.”
The cross-referencing helps in determining, for example, whether it is one person committing five crimes or five crimes committed by different people, Johnson said.
“Before SCIEx, it was difficult to connect the dots,” said Johnson. “One law enforcement agency couldn’t look at others’ data in an efficient manner. What SCIEx does is provide a search on text, name or even context searches where you can look up a word or phrase within the report, and it brings up a list of people who meet that search criteria. And if a person has a specific type of alert, like a child predator or sex offender, that information appears in red.”
Johnson said other states are eyeing the system. Tennessee’s state bureau of investigation has signed a contract for implementation, and SCRA recently helped the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area in North Carolina prepare a grant to purchase the program. Kentucky and Alabama have asked about the system as well.
“We’re trying to spread it throughout the nation,” he said.
Several new features will be available within the next few months, including a connection to pawn shop data, the addition of photos into the system and upload of the “gang database.”
Johnson said the architecture is open source and non-proprietary, meaning the software code is changeable, which would allow each jurisdiction to adjust the technology to fit its own system.
“The software was paid for by a government grant, so we consider it paid for by the taxpayers, and we provide the software free to all law enforcement agencies in the country,”
Johnson said. “Because it’s open source, if someone makes a change that enhances it, we would ask that they share the enhancement so we can provide it to others. Plus, because it’s not proprietary, there’s no ‘upping the ante’ on software maintenance or upgrades.”
Bradham said the original intention of the program was to determine the feasibility of gaining cooperation and agreement for law enforcement agencies to share information.
“We’re very proud of the fact that SCRA had a role in development that system and
extending it across the state,” he said.
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