US state police uses OHLEG-SE to track down data

23.06.2006
Almost 1,000 police departments in Ohio have found critical new crime-fighting tools by gaining access to the digital records kept by neighboring law enforcement agencies.

Since December, the Ohio attorney general's office has been working to link local police departments and their criminal records with a statewide data interoperability effort.

The Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway Search Engine (OHLEG-SE) was created by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro to help expand state and local crime-fighting resources. OHLEG-SE is an Internet-based tool that can securely comb through numerous crime databases using a single log-in and query, making it easier to use than separate crime databases.

For police officers, searching for information on a suspect or a rash of crimes used to require manually logging into several separate crime databases -- a process that could take hours.

Now, officers in even the smallest communities can log in just once and quickly gain access to criminal information in the OHLEG-SE.

The project, which began in 2003, faced a major hurdle: finding a way to get the disparate crime information systems to interoperate with each other. One goal of the OHLEG-SE was to allow each police department to use the software it wants while setting standards software vendors could use to make their products compatible with rival products.