"Improving community safety for our citizens and providing law enforcement with tools that help keep more public-safety officers on the streets to solve crime is a top priority in Alaska," said Gov. Frank Murkowski. "ALEISS is a powerful, responsible and cost-effective model for how our nation can allocate resources to help protect our communities."
Funding for the first phase of the initiative will be provided by a federal grant administered by the state of Alaska and the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center Northwest (NLECTC-NW). NLECTC-NW is a program of the National Institute of Justice, a unit of the United States Department of Justice.
Participating agencies include the Homer Police Department; Seward Police Department; Soldotna Police Department; Juneau Police Department; Anchorage Police Department; Kenai Police Department; Alaska Department of Public Safety; and NLECTC-NW in Anchorage. Unique to this initiative, is an unprecedented effort by ALEISS member agencies to establish clear protocols for use of the system prior to entering into the agreement.
COPLINK works by allowing vast quantities of structured and seemingly unrelated data, currently housed in incompatible computer-based record management systems (RMS), to be organized under a single, highly secure intranet-based platform. One search using known facts from an ongoing criminal investigation can produce qualified leads in minutes -- a process that prior to COPLINK often took days or weeks. Through sophisticated analytics, COPLINK builds "institutional memory," reduces knowledge gaps, and prevents criminals from falling through the cracks.
"COPLINK helps generate qualified leads when there are none and has helped put murderers, repeat sex offenders and drug traffickers behind bars in other jurisdictions around the country where it's in use," said Seward Police Chief Tom Clemons, president of the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police, an organization that was instrumental in forming the ALEISS consortium. "If a child is abducted from the playground, and the only information we have is a general description of the suspect and a partial vehicle description, our chances of catching the person and recovering the child before it becomes a tragedy just increased 100-fold."
"ALEISS members spent several months working together to establish privacy, security and responsibility protocols that will govern the use and operation of the system prior to even entering into the contract," said Bob Griffiths, director of NLECTC-NW. "COPLINK's ability to restrict access to data based on individual user security clearance levels, and the sensitivity of the data itself, coupled with ongoing audit functionality supports critical requirements established by the ALEISS Consortium."
