THE 50 STATES

The Phenix City Police Department plans to acquire mobile data terminals so officers can tap its records management system remotely. Spillman Technologies of Logan, Utah, supplied the system. For two years the Corrections Department has been working on a project to migrate probation and inmate data from an old mainframe to a client-server system. Last month, the department went live with the new system. The system's Informix database runs under Sun Microsystems Solaris and tracks admissions, releases and accounting for the department. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office installed NiceVision digital video and audio surveillance systems from Nice Systems Ltd. of Ra'anana, Israel, in several county jails in the Phoenix area. Equipped with motion detectors, the digital surveillance equipment cost more than $400,000 and provides prison staff with 15-frame-per-second video. The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office is testing Microsoft's eCop, a Web application that police can run from a notebook PC or Microsoft Pocket PC. Written in Visual C++ and Visual Basic, eCop runs over a wireless 19.2-Kbps Cellular Digital Packet Data connection to a Web server. Patrolling officers can access a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 database that contains information on suspects. The Colorado State Patrol has incorporated wireless electronic reporting in 70 percent of state trooper vehicles, said Doug Landin, manager of mobile data systems for the agency. Colorado supports the wireless communications system through contracts with AT&T Corp. and Winstar Communications Inc. of New York. Using a grant from the U.S. Justice Department, the Guilford Police Department equipped 10 of its mobile units with Pentium III notebook PCs running Microsoft Windows 98.The mobile units, which have integrated modems from Sierra Wireless Inc. of Richmond, British Columbia, access a Cellular Digital Packet Data network to tap the department's IBM AS/400 server. The Public Safety Department's Communications Division installed mobile data terminals and Global Positioning System receivers in State Police cars under a pilot implemented in New Castle County. TRW Inc. won a contract to develop a unified communications center for the city's fire, police and ambulance dispatch services. All 911, 311 and other emergency calls will be integrated into a common database. No dollar value has been set for the project. The Law Enforcement Department is contracting with Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego for $1.2 million to design the first phase of its new Integrated Criminal History System.Subcontractors for the project include Brandt Information Systems Inc. of Tallahassee, EDM International of Ellicott City, Md., and Ultra-Scan Corp. of Buffalo, N.Y. The Walker County Sheriff's Department received a $70,000 grant from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to buy a LiveScan fingerprinting, mugshot and booking system from Printrak International Inc. of Anaheim, Calif., a subsidiary of Motorola Inc. Hawaii has no state police department, so the Honolulu Police Department will act as the Aloha State's main link to the FBI's National Crime Information Center database. Mitretek Systems of McLean, Va., developed upgrade specifications the department will need to interface with NCIC. The Bannock County Courthouse in Pocatello installed the SecureScan 2000 concealed weapons detector from Milestone Technology Inc. of Blackfoot, Idaho. Visitors to the courthouse walk through the detector'which uses magnetic sensor chips developed for anti-submarine warfare'to pinpoint the location, size and number of concealed weapons. If the SecureScan device detects a weapon, it automatically locks the courthouse door. Internet users can locate offenders confined to the custody of the state's Corrections Department on its Offenders Search Web site, at . The Corrections Department uses a satellite system from BI Inc. of Boulder, Colo., to track parolees. When parolees are away from one of three reporting centers, corrections officers track them using the Global Positioning System to zero in on transmitters embedded in the parolees' ankle bracelets. The system costs $10.49 per day for each offender. Officials say it costs five times less than it would to keep someone in prison. Police in Boone County and the cities of Florence and Walton have received 134 notebook PCs. The governments will cover the $2.7 million cost of the PCs with the monthly 911 fees paid by county residents on their phone bills. State Rep. A.G. Crowe wants the state to keep better tabs on sex offenders. Crowe has introduced legislation that would require incorporation of Global Positioning System technology in the state's sex offender and child predator registry Web site, at . Law enforcement officers would be able to access names, addresses and geographic locations of sex offenders. More than a year ago, the Maine State Police launched a four-member task force to catch computer criminals. The task force, which works out of the Lewiston Police Department, has worked on more than 200 computer crime cases and contributed to nine indictments.XXXSPLITXXX- The 13 men on death row at the Violent Correctional Adjustment Center in Baltimore have access to two PCs to conduct legal research using CD-ROM references.Correctional officials said the program helps the state fulfill its duty to provide prisoners unlimited access to legal research materials. 'We save the librarians time. It's quicker and less expensive' than providing law books, Corrections Division spokesman Len Sipes said. The inmates are allowed to use the computers for up to five hours a day. The systems are not connected to the Internet. Investigations by the Ashland Police Department's computer crimes unit have led to the arrest of one person for credit card fraud and the closure of several child pornography Web sites, Police Chief Roy Melnick said. The Minneapolis Police Department plans to buy 70 mobile data units for squad cars from Kontron Mobile Computing Inc. of Prairie.The units will run ScoutSync wireless communications software from Aether Systems Inc. of Owings Mills, Md., under Microsoft Windows NT. The systems will be installed through the end of the year at a cost of $2 million. The Public Safety Department's Crime Lab, which processes more than 50,000 pieces of evidence annually from police agencies statewide, has acquired a laboratory information management system called LIMS-plus from JusticeTrax of Phoenix.The system automates evidence-tracking, case management, and analysis and reporting of forensic information. St. Louis County is launching the state's first computer crimes task force. The Illinois Attorney General's office will provide training for the new team. Mussellshell County, population 4,600, used a $60,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department to integrate a video recording system into the county's law enforcement database. The county equipped patrol cars with a system from Mobile-Vision Inc. of Boonton, N.J. Douglas County is working with Qwest Communications International Inc. of Denver to hook up a PictureTel 970 videoconferencing system from PictureTel Corp. of Andover, Mass., in the county jail.The system will connect over Integrated Services Digital Network lines to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's Chicago office. INS officials will be able to identify inmates who need to be deported, thus freeing up prison cells. Mesquite has acquired software from Spillman Technologies Inc. of Logan, Utah, for records management, computer-aided dispatch and imaging. The city paid about $300,000 for the software. New Hampshire prison inmates have designed Web sites for four state agencies as part of their work for the Information Technology Department of New Hampshire Correctional Industries.The inmates create their Web designs offline; no inmate has access to the Internet. The prisoners also perform data entry and can program in Java, Cobol and C++.The price is right: Inmate programmers and Web developers earn between $1.50 and $3 daily depending on experience and performance history. The state is building a 976,000-square-foot State Police technology complex in Hamilton Township, Mercer County at a cost of $73.5 million.The complex will consist of two new buildings: the Troop C Headquarters/Communications Center and the State Police Technology Center. New Mexico's courts have electronically linked with the U.S. District Court and the federal bankruptcy court.Lawyers can electronically file cases with the state, U.S. District and bankruptcy courts, using the same Web front end, said Bob March, clerk of the court for the U.S. District Court, District of New Mexico.March and his team joined forces with AtCourt Corp. of Alameda, Calif., to send files over the Internet in Extensible Markup Language and Java. Mecklenburg County has a contract with PEC Solutions Inc. of Fairfax, Va., Justice Systems Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., and Electronic Data Systems Corp. to develop an integrated criminal justice information system. Officers in the Fargo Police Department use a wireless configuration of PacketCluster patrol software from the mobile government division of Aether Systems Inc. of Owings Mills, Md. The system lets officers send and retrieve the FBI's National Crime Information Center data and share law enforcement information with seven nearby police departments. The Cincinnati Police Department is evaluating vendors for mobile data computers, which are PCs that can be mounted in squad cars but also can go mobile with a docking station. Webmaster Sgt. Tom D. Smith also says the department's Web site, at , is getting between 3,000 and 5,000 visitors a day. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that police must obtain a search warrant before using high-tech devices to gather information from inside a private home. The 5-4 ruling cited a 1992 case involving the Oregon National Guard and Danny Kyllo, a Florence, Ore., resident []. National Guard officers used an Agema 210 ThermaVision thermal imager from Flir Systems of Portland to detect unusual heat patterns emanating from Kyllo's home. Kyllo was using heat-generating high-intensity lamps to grow marijuana.In handing down the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia said that where 'the government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.' The State Police Technology Services Bureau's Strategic Development Division plans to upgrade its Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network from a proprietary communications protocol to TCP/IP.Upgrading the 29-year-old, mainframe-based network to TCP/IP will let officers access enhanced features of the FBI's National Crime Information Center, such as fingerprint images. The State Police have deployed more than 160 Panasonic CF27 Toughbook PCs in their mobile units.The agency also has linked more than 400 additional terminals run by other police agencies to the Rhode Island Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, which uses Unix servers at State Police headquarters in Scituate to support a statewide frame relay network. The State Law Enforcement Division has joined with the FBI and the Secret Service to establish a $3.6 million Computer Crimes Center.The center will feature a $2.5 million forensic science computer installation and an investigative unit with members from the three agencies. The Corrections Department used $163,000 in U.S. Justice Department grant money to download inmate data from a mainframe into a series of Microsoft Access databases. The databases contain digital photos of offenders and other inmate information. All the work was done in-house, said Laurie Feiler, division director. Officials in the Soddy-Daisy Police Department plan to use a $42,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department to upgrade their records management system in cooperation with other police agencies in Hamilton County and neighboring Chattanooga.Soddy-Daisy Police Chief Allen Branum said he expects implementation of the countywide system by the fall. ' Nineteen counties have adopted the Vine victim notification system from Appriss Inc. of Louisville, Ky.The company has installed PCs in each county running the company's proprietary interface program under Microsoft Windows 9x. Every 15 minutes, the Vine systems query each county booking database and relay data about the status of offenders to a central communications center in Louisville.County residents can call a special toll-free number and register for telephone notification of changes in the status of offenders, such as their release from jail.Counties pay a setup charge ranging from $11,000 to $20,000, depending on the size of their jails, and annual operating fees ranging from $30,000 to $60,000. The Attorney General's Office is the lead agency in Utah for the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a database that houses crime information on all cases involving unsolved homicides, missing persons and unidentified bodies. Analysts in the Attorney General's Office study case information that police officers have sent to the office on either a disk or through Law Enforcement Online, an encrypted law enforcement intranet.Analysts send any cases with similarities to other violent crimes to the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va. The Brattleboro Police Department upgraded its computers to higher-end Pentium PCs and Microsoft Windows 95 so that officials could link to the Vermont Incident-Based Reporting System, a statewide computer-aided dispatch and records management system.The Brattleboro police access VIBRS over a virtual private network, which runs under Sun Microsystems Solaris. The Henrico County police department has ordered upgrades for 201 of its ruggedized PCMobile notebook PCs from Cycomm International Inc. of McLean.Meanwhile, the Fairfax County police ordered an additional 100 PCMobile computers from the company, bringing the county's total to about 900 of the computers. The two orders are worth $1.4 million. Now in its fourth year, the State Courtroom of the Future project lets county courthouses and jails transmit voice, video and data over an asynchronous transfer mode network. The savings in transportation costs alone exceed $750,000 a year. To reduce driver's license fraud, the Motor Vehicle Division will add 2-D bar codes to all state licenses over the next eight years.The bar codes are nearly impossible to counterfeit, state officials said. Viisage Technology Inc. of Littleton, Mass., is providing the technology. More than 500 Web sites offer fraudulent driver's licenses, DMV said. The Laramie Police Department is rolling out Phase 1 of the city's wireless enhanced 911 system this month, Cmdr. Dale Stallder said. Previously, if a citizen called 911 on a cell phone, the call would reach a nonemergency line. Police and rescue personnel couldn't identify the source of the call. The new system will bounce signals from the cell phones off cell towers. Later enhancements will give the location of the wireless caller.