Issue link: http://lawandordermag.epubxp.com/i/189636
Chief Douglas Kish of the Catasauqua PD. were ready to go and implementation was immediate." Plus, he added, "CODY is easy for offcers to learn, which made training fast." The RMS provides each department with two access points that share the same, unifed back-end. CODY Express is a full Webdeployed RMS application and feld reporting tool designed and confgured for effcient, bandwidth-lean use on laptops in the feld or anywhere it is needed. CODY Desktop provides the same functionality along with additional data analysis, reporting and administrative features for use at the station. With CODY Desktop, users can create reports from virtually any combination of the department's RMS data through the Report Explorer tool. "As an administrator, my favorite feature is the information I can generate and the reports I can create to instantly monitor what's actually happening in the borough," Chief Kish stated. Step 2 - Cross-Agency Data Exchange through COBRA.net – "Facebook for Law Enforcement" Concurrent with the RMS implementation for all agencies, the county deployed its new COBRA.net data core and exchange engine, with each agency being linked in as they went live on CODY RMS. The COBRA.net Core forms the foundation for all of the county's data integration and exchange projects, both present and future. While allowing each agency to maintain its RMS data and access privileges, COBRA.net brings all of this information together and creates a network that allows authorized users from all agencies to search for information from all other participating agencies—at the station or in the feld. When a user at one agency saves information on a person, incident, vehicle, etc., including digital photos, in their RMS, it's available through COBRA.net within seconds. As Detective Darren Simmers of Upper Macungie Police Department noted: "CODY RMS keeps all the shared information from our department in one place. It is NEVER mixed up with RMS data from the other agencies. Yet, with COBRA.net, we still have access to everybody else's shared information. It's all right there—in real time." Like their counterparts across the country, the county's investigators and offcers in the feld have access to multiple federal and state criminal databases, but COBRA.net helps offcers fll in the blanks. "Most of those databases only have information if the person was arrested," Detective Simmers said, "and even then, the data in those external sources can be old, or the incident report and Det. Darren Simmers of the Upper Macungie PD. contact information, like phone numbers and past addresses, may not be there. They are in COBRA.net, though. Best of all, COBRA. net lets us search all connected data sources with ONE SEARCH. We don't have to search each system… COBRA.net puts it in one place. It's like Facebook for the law enforcement community!" What makes COBRA.net so valuable, Simmers maintained, is the variety of information available and the different ways it can be searched. "Not everyone has a driver's license," he explained. "Before COBRA.net, if all you had was a driver's license, you were done. Now, if I have a suspect's nickname and age, for example, I can use C.tac 5, CODY's Web-based search app, to run a countywide search on that name and then an age query on just the name matches. That gives me something to work with." COBRA.net can also run searches on a partial license plate number or other incomplete information, which can help narrow down the scope of an investigation. When asked about the primary beneft of this information, Chief Kish quickly responded: "Offcer safety is the key and COBRA.net with C.tac 5 provides that extra measure of safety for offcers in the feld." An address search that shows anyone associated with that address and their history of violent behavior, for example, can help prepare an offcer before entering a residence on even a routine matter. "A lot of bad people just haven't been caught yet," Simmers noted. "A long list of hits in COBRA.net is a red fag that I need to deal with that person differently." At present, all Lehigh County police departments and several county task forces, as well as three departments in adjacent Northampton County participate in the network. In addition, information on individuals arrested in the county by state police troopers and processed at the county's central booking facility fows through COBRA.net and is available for searching by appropriate personnel. Secure Data Exchange with Disparate Systems: No Agency Gets Left Behind When the Chiefs Association chose CODY RMS, Allentown Police Department, the county's largest city, had just committed to a different provider's RMS software. Fortunately, COBRA.net is specifcally designed to work with other data sources beyond CODY RMS; in fact, most COBRA.net initiatives are linking multiple, disparate RMS databases from other providers. CODY's Data Services Team worked closely with Allentown and Lehigh County to rapidly ensure a full understanding of the agency's data sharing www.lawandordermag.com 25