Data Sharing Implemented at the Boulder County, Colo., Sheriff's Office

VisionTEK announced the successful implementation of their UNITY data sharing solution at the Boulder County Sheriff's Office (BCSO). The solution helps BCSO meet their need of providing their officers query capabilities into their Records Management System (RMS) - functionality previously unavailable to officers in the field. The solution opens the door for much bigger payoffs for Boulder County and other Front Range law enforcement agencies because it gives them a low cost data sharing solution that can be implemented in days, without time intensive IT efforts. "The engineers at VisionTEK made this effort, incredibly easy," said BCSO Gary Anderson. "Our IT effort for this project was less than 24 hours. That includes testing and revisions." 

For several years, Boulder County Sheriff's Office has been on the VisionTEK UNITY network, a turnkey communications and data sharing solution that allows qualifying subscribers to receive BOLOs, severe weather alerts, and amber alerts. BCSO continues to use the UNITY network to receive these types of messages, to send secure email and to send instant message communications to their officers and officers of other agencies. "UNITY's infrastructure is a perfect vehicle for facilitating data sharing among agencies on disparate systems. It is data agnostic. It can communicate to any system, we just need to know what language a system speaks," said Paul Brill, UNITY Technical Director. "In the case of sharing law enforcement data between two agencies, each agency only needs to allow the other agency query access to their system. This is accomplished by simply configuring and publishing the SQL query subscriptions. The secure routing of data is automatically handled by the UNITY network." 

With the UNITY infrastructure already in place at BCSO, VisionTEK engineering needed to perform only a few configurations to create and publish the queries that now allow the officers to execute queries against their RMS database records. "The goal of data sharing is to reduce investigation time and to improve law enforcement's ability to track offenders across jurisdictional boundaries. This solution greatly enhances an agency's ability to do that," said BCSO Gary Anderson. "Offenders do not stay in one area. To better serve the public, law enforcement must be able to see a complete picture of an offender's past. Data sharing is the only true way of creating that picture."