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Law enforcement increasingly turns to data warehousing to compile information on criminals on the move.

For quite some time it has been a catch phrase at justice conferences across the nation and throughout the world: integrated justice. It means different things to different people, but in the end it is really about sharing more accurate information, providing access to it more quickly and reducing the staffing required to shuffle the millions of sheets of paper produced in the name of justice each day.

For law enforcement agencies, quick access to accurate data is the most important issue, but reducing staffing needs in the records department can be a boon as well. Ten years ago, the predominant obstacle to true integration was the technology, but today, most experts agree that the barriers to integration are largely human. Traditional intergovernmental rivalries, lack of trust among agencies and the natural desire to believe one agency has unique needs compared to a similar agency a hundred miles away, have all contributed to a less-than-integrated justice system.

The goal of coordinating all the data already available and continues to flow down the justice pipeline is increasingly uniting disparate agencies. Successful commercial and public integration efforts are becoming common, and on the backs of these successes, other agencies are learning how to build regional and statewide systems. From San Diego to the heartland, justice professionals are learning from each other and growing the future of justice.

"Criminals are becoming more and more mobile. Gangs have chapters in every state and run like loosely managed, multinational corporations. Serial killers cross state lines and bank robbers work from town to town," explained Sgt. Steve Natale of the Los Angeles Police Department. "These changes are finally pushing law enforcement to become more integrated. Within five years 10 at the outside all agencies will be linked to repository nodes that house data, including everything from criminal records and field- interview cards to traffic and court records."

The sharing of data among law enforcement agencies and throughout the larger justice community -- courts, district attorney offices and juvenile agencies -- has always been a stepping stone to success. Often it is not new investigative information that cracks a case or closes a conviction.

"We know that the child molesters, the kidnappers and the rapists are almost always in the system already. They dont just wake up at age 40 and commit their first crime," said Kip Rolle, a former police chief and now president of TracNet Corporation based in Menlo Park, Calif. TracNet specializes in building records management (RMS) and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems for law enforcement. "A ton of information is already sitting out there on the databases of local, state and regional agencies of all kinds. The trick is getting it out and into the hands of the cops on the street."

To accomplish these goals there are several technological options. One option is an Internet-style approach, where an individual agency can access anothers databases directly over secure networks. A second option is the mediated approach that allows a single user operating from anywhere on a common network to access information from multiple, distributed data sources. However, the system most often looked to is one based on a data-warehousing approach, where information is gathered together into a single database from a variety of sources.

NCIC
One highly successful example of the data-warehousing approach is the federal National Criminal Information Center (NCIC), which collects data from across the nation and provides access to all law enforcement agencies.

In most cases the data is gathered at the local level, sent to state justice departments and then forwarded to the FBI which maintains the NCIC.

The system began over 30 years ago in 1967 and has grown to serving over 80,000 agencies,