In conjunction with the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference this week in Chicago, i2, an IBM company, announced that Coplink is now accessible on the iPhone, iPad and Android. The system is used by 4,500 law enforcement agencies across the nation, according to the company.
The system is used to generate investigative leads on suspects, to identify crime trends and to share data. It has been called “Google for police officers.”
The system includes information sharing, data analytics, CompStat, biometric data and lead generation that can be used by neighboring jurisdictions, and across states and agencies. The company’s announcement said the new mobile capability will improve situation awareness for law enforcement officers by including “automated geospatial searches of recent events” that will draw upon state and local criminal records from multiple jurisdictions’ databases.
Coplink was first developed by the Tucson, Ariz., Police Department and University of Arizona researchers in the mid-1990s, and was funded beginning in 1997 by the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation. Since then it has evolved into an off-the-shelf suite.
