White House to Push for Federal Supervision of Police Data Sharing
In a new White House-backed plan, DHS will “pull together,” coordinate and evaluate information from state and local law enforcement, a federal official told a DoJ advisory committee Thurs. The Presidential policy is “basically being approved,” said Sue Reingold, deputy program mgr.-Office of the Dir. of National Intelligence. Speaking before DoJ’s Global Justice Information Sharing Advisory Committee, she stressed the importance of technology in fighting terrorism and crime: “We need to collaborate so that time sensitive threat information gets into the hands of law enforcement.”
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Deputy Attorney Gen. Paul McNulty had been scheduled to appear but couldn’t, sending Counsel Michael Scudder in his place. Neither Scudder nor Asst. Attorney Gen. Regina Scholfield commented on the new initiative.
In the Presidential plan, state and local authorities will send their intelligence and criminal data through “existing pipes” to be federally verified and shared, she said. Law enforcement in all states is already integrating national, state and county information systems, National Center for State Courts Vp Tom Clarke told the committee. Clarke headed the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXML) project to connect DHS, emergency services, transportation and electronic health records.
Law enforcement and criminal justice have “an increasing need to communicate with others” and many agency CIOs are struggling with 5 or 6 IT architectures, he said. The system “needs a significant investment of [financial] resources beyond what they have,” said National Criminal Justice Assn. senior policy adviser Tom O'Reilly.
But with so many acronyms and hard-to-digest technical terms surrounding interoperability, policy-makers need a “layman’s description” of tech efforts, said Carl Wicklund, American Probation & Parole Assn. exec. dir.: “We need to do that to get to our other partners” and federal funds.
NDex -- the FBI’s information-sharing system test -- is also running, Supervisory Special Agent Tim Reid told the committee. NDex gathers “incidents” -- arrests, interviews, theft reports, warrants -- that occur “during the course of criminal investigations,” and pulls them into the database, he said: It’s “performing automatically what detectives do.” A prototype system in L.A. already contains 177,000 pieces of “legacy” data; the FBI anticipates 2,000 daily data submissions through a Google tool, he said. San Diego and Del. also launched pilots.
The bureau’s Privacy Advocacy Group invited the ACLU’s innocence project to see how information is shared, Reid said: “They didn’t give it the Housekeeping stamp of approval,” but they “really didn’t have a big problem with it,” he said. The FBI team behind NDex may send a recommendation of full deployment to the attorney general, he said.
In Maricopa County, Ariz., police found that the “inability to have to get the right info to right people at right time,” hindered law enforcement, said Conference of State Court Administrators Vp David Byers. The county’s new, field-deployed, GJXML-based system is already “making sharing information easier,” he said. A DVD shown to the committee followed the path of information after an arrest, using Google mapping technology. When police scan a suspect’s fingerprints, the data are sent to the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System and fed into the Ariz. criminal history database. These and other data gathered during booking also flow to the FBI, prosecutors and the public defender’s office in minutes, said George Roundy of eCorridor, which helped with the project.