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.