Last month the
city of Marietta, Ga., was awarded an Innovation in Information Technology Award by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Technology Center for its Web-based search implementation.
Officers' electronic submission of incident data (via incident reports) had, over the years, built a mountain of data with little or no easy mechanism for them to search and retrieve it for investigation and analysis. The process was unfriendly, cumbersome and underutilized the public safety data.
The solution was to develop a quick and easy browser-based "Google-like" search capability to handle the city's vast collection of incident data. This search capability can be used when officers are in the office or on the road, via a wireless network.
"Marietta's prime focus was to develop an officer-friendly, scalable software search tool for use by our detectives, but with an eye toward deploying this technology out to our patrol cars," said Gene Estensen, MIS director of the city of Marietta. "This gives our officers the ability to quickly analyze crime data that was hidden away in our mainframe."
