IBM Uses Cloud To Take Bite Out Of Crime

Law enforcement agencies almost by definition wrestle with a large amount of conflicting data that makes it difficult to correlate information into something that represents actionable intelligence. To help those agencies address those issues, IBM today unfurled IBM i2 COPlink on Cloud, an instance of an application that makes it easier to search law enforcements databases that IBM acquired way back in 2011.

Hosted on Nlets, IBM i2 COPlink on Cloud is essentially a community cloud managed by the International Justice and Public Safety Network. Stephen Russo, director of law enforcement solutions for IBM, said the cloud implementation of i2 COPlink is designed to make the application much more accessible to municipalities that don’t have the funds required to fund a significant IT project on their own. As such, Russo said IBM is looking to work with partners that have relationships with those municipalities or specific expertise in law enforcement application software.

In general, Russo said the biggest challenge any law enforcement agency faces is application integration. While i2 COPlink exposes application programming interfaces, IT services firms are needed to integrate law enforcement applications with emergency services. To that end, IBM in collaboration with The Weather Company also announced today that they have developed an emergency management application that embeds real-time analytics and visualization tools to enable organizations to set up well-defined procedures for responding to unexpected events.

In addition, Russo also noted that many of these applications now need to integrated with both video applications that provide access to critical information and social networks that are increasing relied on to share that information.

Originally developed at the University of Arizona for use by the Tuscon police departments, i2 COPlink is now employed by 6,000 law enforcement agencies. As part of IBM’s overall Smarter Cities campaign IBM has been steadily working towards extending a variety of municipal applications into the emerging realm of Internet of Things (IoT). As more data gets collected in real time Russo said an opportunity to analyze that data in a way where it becomes more actionable clearly presents itself.

The issue, of course, is that there are many more small towns and cities than larger ones, which means that applications such as i2COPlink can’t span the globe without help from the local solution providers. In some cases, Russo said IBM will take the lead in deploying i2 COPlink, while in other cases a local solution provider will leverage IBM subject matter expertise to deliver the solution. Whatever the approach the cloud is clearly making it more feasible to deliver those solutions to a much broader set of global municipalities.