By Greg Bogosian
Police1 Contributor
The following is paid content from Appriss
How many times have you heard this story? A law enforcement agency goes looking for an offender, suspect, witness, parolee, or sex offender, and conducts a time-intensive nationwide search, only to find out that yes, the individual they want to talk to was in custody somewhere else, but by the time the information comes back, they’ve been released into the wind once again. It’s a cycle which has been repeated time and time again, to the frustration of investigating officers, since the earliest days of law enforcement. Even worse, perhaps, are those instances where you’re looking for a missing or kidnapped child (especially in cases of custodial kidnapping), and you find out that you could have located or recovered the child if only you’d had information sooner.
It may surprise some of you, however, to learn that there is a nationwide solution in place which not only eliminates the problems above, but gives you access to critical information on a real-time basis (within 7-12 minutes of an individual being booked into a jail, for example), including allowing you to set alerts for individuals whose whereabouts, and incarceration status, you need to know. That system, from Appriss®, is called JusticeXchange, and is currently in use by over 50,000 law enforcement users nationwide, including 7 states with global adoption for all of their agencies. This web, batch and API based product, which allows for tightly-controlled access managed by state law enforcement entities or their designees, is simple, intuitive, and flexible, and can be accessed anywhere internet service is available, including by officers in the field on MDT’s or smartphones – saving time when time is of the essence in bringing justice to victims.
Today’s era of reduced budgets and staffing, and the resultant “more with less” circumstances which many agencies are facing, has led quite a few of them to be forced to reassign personnel to routine operations at the cost of investigative and other resources. One of the things that JusticeXchange does is bring back some of that capacity, with a lot more automation, meaning that not only can your agency once again effectively find suspects and others that they are looking for, but you can do it at a lower cost and with much less time required by personnel whose time could be better used elsewhere.
The targeted alert feature of the solution means that you can set up a widely-variable search notification (based on not only such standard search parameters as name, date of birth, social security number, etc., but also by such things as scars, marks, and tattoos – which is a great help when you have serious recidivists with multiple aliases, some of which you may not even know) and be alerted immediately when that person is incarcerated, no matter where they are geographically. The alerts can also be used to identify a change in geographic location for an offender, important when you’re tracking a parolee or registered (or non-compliant) sex offender. That’s pretty exciting stuff, as anyone in law enforcement can tell you – the possibilities for apprehending and tracking a suspect/offender grow dramatically, and criminal offenders who frequently reoffend, as is the case for many, are likely to be arrested on minor charges even when wanted for more major crimes.
Perhaps the best part of JusticeXchange comes about through something which is at the core of Appriss’ mission, according to CEO Mike Davis: the cost to government agencies is relatively low, or in some cases, carries no cost at all. States can purchase enterprise licenses, agencies can purchase by-user or –department licenses, and now, it’s even possible to acquire JusticeXchange for free when your agency or state puts into place the free, nationalized and streamlining Collision Reporting Solutions from Appriss (contact Appriss for more information).
For more information, contact Appriss at rjones@appriss.com today.