eCOPS Solution Comes To The Aid Of Toronto's Finest

To get data moving more quickly across different law enforcement divisions in its city, the Toronto Police Service worked with an integrator to assemble a variety of IBM products to create a mobile electronic information transmission system.

Toronto's Case and Occurrence Processing System, or eCOPS, will provide officers with an electronic method of processing missing person reports, crime cases, warrants and other criminal information, said Chris Pentleton, principal at Pentleton Consulting, the Toronto-based integrator that designed the solution.

"We wanted to integrate crime data from the cruiser to the court, with officers entering data at the scene of the occurrence and receiving the information where and when they needed it on demand," said Toronto Police Services Inspector Mike Farrar.

Once eCOPS is fully implemented next year, Pentleton said he expects officers to be able to process information that will be sent immediately to courts, jails and other precincts. An officer in the field will be able to issue a warrant in realtime and it will immediately be transferred to a computer system that can be accessed by all other officers in the city. The current process, which requires officers to file paper-based reports in their precincts and then have those reports entered into a computer, can mean days of delay before a criminal is apprehended.

The system was put together using IBM's DB2 and WebSphere components, said Pentleton.

Now that eCOPS is being deployed, Pentleton said he has turned his attention to finding ways to move data throughout city departments more effectively.

Officers have been doing some processing from the field with portable systems through a private Datatec radio dispatch system developed by Motorola, said Pentleton. But the low-bandwidth system is currently being used exclusively for 911 dispatch and light data look-ups, he said.

Pentleton said he wants to expand officers' on-scene capabilities to include the ability to file reports right from the scene of a crime to save officers the task of completing the paper-based reports back at the police station.

As a result, Pentleton is working to transition the force to a faster 2.5G wireless network this year. In the meantime, his company has rolled out 802.11 hotspots at the stations.

Pentleton set up the system so officers can access the network from the station parking lot to download their reports and receive updates at the end of their shift,all without having to go inside the station house. "We're using the increased bandwidth to send report data and also to push updates to the officers'

systems," Pentleton said.

To ensure that the system can switch effectively between the Wireless WAN services and the 802.11 hotspots, Pentleton said he also included in eCOPS IBM's Everyplace Wireless Gateway. Unveiled this summer, the gateway enables seamless roaming between different wireless networks without the need to reboot when a user switches networks, said Adel Al-Saleh, general manager of IBM's Wireless E-Business Solutions.

The eCOPS solution is expected help the Toronto Police Service,the fifth-largest municipal police service in North America, with 5,000 officers and 2,000 civilian employees,achieve significant savings. IBM estimates the solution will save the department $2.9 million (U.S.) in administrative costs per year.