New Information-Sharing App For Police Dep.
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Municipal police departments in Bradford County, Pa., have decided to start using a new computerized system that will allow the different departments in the county to share information with each other. The software for the system will be provided by MetroAlert and the whole system will cost $64,000.
The Bradford County Sheriff, Clinton Walters, explained that the program allows officers deployed in the streets to see relevant information in real time. For example, they could see if someone is committing a crime in a different city or check whether another law enforcement agency has already dealt with the person they’ve just arrested.
All of Bradford’s police departments will be using this new system, said Walters, and added that today each department in the Bradford police force has its own system for managing criminal files, and the new software and server will be used to tie these management systems together. The officers in the county could access the system from their own computers during a car patrol or from the police departments. Furthermore, the new software will allow officers to share specific information with a specific department without revealing it to the rest.
No doubt this improvement in communications inside the police force will increase the safety of the officers. If there is, for example, information on someone loose in the county, who poses a risk, every officer can be informed in an instant and keep updated on the event in real-time.
Perhaps the next development in this field could be an information sharing app between citizens and the police. Much like the navigational app Waze, which also offers traffic reports based on a community of users who share real-time information about traffic, the same can be done for keeping public order. Citizens could upload a picture of a criminal or a thief they took on their cell phone in real-time to an integrated network and help capture them.
