Statewide Information Sharing In South Carolina
In 2001, the sheriffs of Charleston, Berkley, and Dorchester Counties in South Carolina and the chiefs of police for the municipalities of Charleston, Mount Pleasant, and North Charleston launched the Low Country Information Technology Improvement Project (ITIP), which enabled the six agency executives to integrate their information systems through a secure, integrated network that would allow information to be shared electronically across jurisdictional boundaries.
Soon, officials with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) saw the attractiveness of making ITIP available to law enforcement agencies across the state. This desire to make ITIP available throughout South Carolina resulted in the creation of the South Carolina Information Exchange (SCIEx), which, like ITIP, was developed with the help of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center Southeast Region (NLECTC-SE).
The system is designed to provide law enforcement officers, investigators, and analysts with the necessary data and resources to investigate cases and suspicious activities. SCIEx will also eventually act as a central data warehouse that will store all incident information from incident reports and field interview documentation from all law enforcement agencies in South Carolina.
In addition, state law enforcement officials are planning to provide a Web-based records management system (RMS) with statewide licensing to law enforcement agencies in South Carolina that do not have existing RMS capability. Officials also hope to establish a mechanism to provide connectivity or access to desired databases of six state agencies in order to give the South Carolina Information Exchange Fusion Center access to the information for the purposes of mining and analyzing the information.
The Fusion Center will have the ability to display incident and other geo-referenced data on a GIS map and perform crime mapping and analysis functions that are usually found in commercial off-the-shelf products.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Police Chief (04/06) Vol. 73, No. 4; Knight, Coleman .
