eCrime is the newest crime management system that is set to replace ULTRA. Please visit the eCrime landing page for more information.
About
UCR Local Template for Reporting and Analysis (ULTRA) is a case management system to assist local agencies in creating and submitting their Uniform Crime Reports. In late 2008, the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (ACJIC) unveiled ULTRA, a software system that was developed by the Center for Advanced Public Safety with their close guidance and sponsorship. ULTRA is a smart-client software application that allows agencies to create and submit Alabama Uniform Incident Offense (IO) and Arrest reports to ACJIC via the Internet. ULTRA offers a no-cost solution to agencies who wish to be able to enter, search and retrieve state IO, Arrest and Supplement Reports.
Features:
UCR data submissions to ACJIC on a near real-time basis
LETS searching capability while connected to the Internet
Pre-population of forms using “drag and drop” of LETS query results into IO and Arrest reports
Spell checking
Generation of printable reports
Driver’s license reader compatibility
Ability for officers to search and review all of their agency’s reports
ULTRA users (agencies) can create reports either offline or online. The system will buffer any information that needs uploading and perform the transfer once connectivity is established. ULTRA also allows local agencies to store information on local ordinance violations and non-criminal events for local agency use only.
ULTRA is available at no cost with minimal set up requirements.
For more information or to express your agency’s interest in ULTRA, please contact ACJIC’s Crime Statistics and Information Division at (334) 517-2450.
MapClick is a mapping application that is integrated into the MOVE framework. Location information from MapClick is stored in Move as objects that can be populated into eCite, eCrash or any of the applications residing in MOVE.
It has multiple layers for coordinates, node numbers, link numbers, road names, road codes and milepoints. With the layers tool, users can get details about layers, toggle between them, and turn them off.
Users can click a spot on the map and be provided with the two nearest nodes, the GPS coordinates,and an address. The user can populate this information into the various MOVE applications.
MapClick works independently, with an internet connection, or when paired with a GPS device:
independently: using location information stored within the program
internet connection: adds real-time location information from Google
GPS device: enables tracking, which shows the user’s car on the map and saves the current location
MapClick can be used as an alternative to Microsoft MapPoint. However, MapPoint remains integrated into MOVE.
Cite is an Electronic Citation Generation and Processing System.
It was developed as a process-level solution to the outdated and time-consuming paper citation form used by law enforcement and the court system. Citations generated through eCite are quick, accurate, secure, and legible.
eCite is more than a form. The vision for eCite was born out of the needs of the court system for timely and secure access to accurate citation data, but citation data was originated by law enforcement. Therefore, CAPS developed the eCite system as a means of collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data and making that data easily accessible by all agencies involved.
The eCite system is fully integrated into the Mobile Officers’ Virtual Environment (MOVE) and is not offered as a stand-alone product.
Process
eCite enables the entire citation process, from citation issuance to transferring citation data to the district court system, to be completed 100 percent electronically. NO hand-entered data!
The multiple users, interfaces, equipment, and state legislation involved this process solution illustrates CAPS’ integrated systems approach to software design and problem-solving.
eCite is utilized by officers in the field to issue tickets, print a copy for the violator, and transmit the data to a server repository using a laptop, notebook, or tablet PC.
eCite improves an officer’s safety and efficiency by enabling faster citation issuance, reducing exposure to a potentially dangerous defendant, and the ability to validate a defendant’s identity and view their previous records. Redundant paperwork is eliminated through an integrated activity logbook. These factors allow officers to spend a greater percentage of their shift in patrol and results in increased job satisfaction.
Law enforcement and court system personnel access officers submit data through CAPS developed administrative portals, eSwear, eSearch, and Advance.
The suite of administrative tools supports the electronic filing of citations with the court system, as well as the backend processing and archiving of the citation data.
eSwear is a virtual swearing process that allows the officer to swear to the authenticity of the ticket and the clerk to confirm via a touch-screen kiosk equipped with biometric-based authentication.
eSearch enables clerks and law enforcement administrators to search, access, and evaluate existing citations. Citations can be printed from this site as needed.
ADVANCE is a web portal dashboard enabling users to analyze and visualize data.
CAPS provides free, secure web services for law enforcement and court personnel to pull data collected in eCite into their records management systems (RMS) and court case management systems (CMS) respectively.
Overview Video
Features & MOVE Integration
Auto-populates citation data from driver’s license barcode and magnetic stripe scanning (MOVE integration)
Auto-populates driver’s license information (implemented by LETS-GO)
Auto-populates certain form fields with setting defaults (e.g., county, court, etc.)
Auto-populates driver and/or vehicle data from third-party applications (ASPEN*, etc.)
Auto-populates location data from GPS device
Interfaces with web pages and other applications through MOVE
Automated data validation (checks for consistency and completeness)
Citation replication (simplifies & speeds the writing of multiple offenses)
Defines screen templates for customized preset values
Automated, internet-based upload of ticket data to central data repository
Automated, internet-based download of ticket numbers from a central repository
Writes and tracks warning citations
Transfers data from eCite into officer’s daily activity log through MOVE
* ASPEN is a FMCSA software for federal electronic reporting of commercial vehicle violations Learn more about MOVE
Electronic Solution
Issuance: via the eCite software on laptops in the officer’s vehicles
eTransmittal: once Internet connectivity is established via cellular air cards or hot spots
eSwear: via a computer kiosk at the clerk’s office
eFiling: via the integrated network – no mailing of hard copies
ePayments: via credit card over the internet
eSearch and statistical analyses: via secure password-protected web portal
History, Sponsors, & Partners
eCite was initially developed with the support and guidance of the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts (AOC). Financial support was provided by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA). eCite was developed in cooperation with the Alabama Department of Public Safety (DPS) who provided invaluable feedback.
eCite was the first system within Alabama to utilize license scanners, GPS devices, and laptops to aid officers in the traffic citation writing process.
2002: eCite software development began
2003: Phase 1, eCite ticketing process pilot, executed at a fixed-base location truck weigh station in Heflin, Alabama.
2003: Phase 2, eCite mobile connectivity pilot, tested viability of cellular air cards for laptop Internet connectivity.
2003: Statewide eCite rollout to all motor carrier (MCSAP) state troopers.
2005: First municipal pilot was with the Tuscaloosa Police Department.
2007: 100% eCite adoption by Alabama state troopers. Alabama municipal rollout began.
2009: eCite pilot project in Roswell, New Mexico.
2010: eCite deployed for Mississippi Highway Patrol’s State Troopers.
2013: eCite deployed for Arkansas law enforcement personnel.
Today, eCite has been deployed in 300 municipalities and 4 states. Most Alabama state agencies use eCite and its user base continues to expand. Eighty percent of citations in Alabama are produced using eCite.
The eCite system is a client-based application, but it uses the Internet to transmit the tickets. If there is no connectivity, the tickets are stored to be transmitted later. This approach led to a successful pilot, which was followed shortly by a statewide rollout to all motor carrier (MCSAP) state troopers. The product was so popular and successful that the project has expanded to general vehicle enforcement troopers.
Customized for Other Jurisdicitons
Our developers can customize eCite for specific jurisdictions. eCite’s customization options, such as non-uniform traffic citations, commercial vehicle weight form for overweight citations, and record management systems integration, making it highly flexible for adaption to any jurisdiction, municipality, or state.
eCite’s successful Alabama deployment led to its customization and adoption by three other states: New Mexico, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
New Mexico
After eCite’s Alabama state-wide rollout in 2007, New Mexico became the second state to implement eCite. CAPS began a pilot eCite project in Roswell, NM, in 2009. The New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts then contracted CAPS to develop a system that would aggregate electronic citation data from multiple vendors, including TraCS, and make the data available within the Court’s Case Management System (CMS).* This system of aggregating, cleaning, and integrating data eliminated repetitive data entry by the courts.
*New Mexico utilizes Odyssey Court Management System by Tyler Technologies which integrates with eCite.
Mississippi
Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) sponsored CAPS to customize and deploy eCite to all MHP Troopers and production use began in October 2010.
Tailoring eCite for Mississippi included:
Implementing a secure download of issued citations to the appropriate Justice Court jurisdictions
Providing administrative forms and procedures
Building a password-protected, administrative website for MHP supervisors
Developing a password-protected, analytical dashboard. The dashboard has drill-down capabilities for all data element(s) contained in eCite and GPS mapping based on citation issuance.
After the successful deployment of eCite with only the basic traffic citation, MHP commissioned CAPS to add DUI citations. Now all citations, including DUI, are transferred to the courts electronically.
Currently, there are approximately 600 officers using the system. MHP has begun deploying eCite to local agencies. In Mississippi, there have been over 1.6 million citations issued with the eCite system and over 93 percent of all citations have been transferred to the courts electronically.
Arkansas
Arkansas State Police (ASP) contracted CAPS to develop a customized eCite solution for all Arkansas law enforcement personnel and the deployment process began in early 2013.
Tailoring eCite for Arkansas included:
Customizing forms for citations and administrative products
Connecting to the Arkansas State NCIC Switch in real-time for onboard data retrieval
Developing Arkansas Threat Level Assessment System (ATLAS)
Atlas is a UI Rich NCIC application that allows officers to conduct NLETS searches through the state’s message switch and to auto-populate eCite with the resulting data. ATLAS is used by all ASP Highway Patrol and over 10 million queries have been performed using the application.
eCite is used by Arkansas State Police’s entire highway patrol unit and ASP is working with local agencies to deploy eCite to all municipalities. Since its implementation in 2013, 1.8 million eCite documents have been submitted.
Implementation Benefits
eCite revolutionized the citation process for Alabama law enforcement and court system personnel by improving accuracy, efficiency, and safety. While eCite fulfilled all its project goals, it’s highway safety benefits and research implications are deeply rooted in CAPS’ mission for its software research and development to make the world a safer and better place.
Law Enforcement Personnel
Reduced exposure to potentially dangerous defendants due to faster citation issuance
Increased situational awareness via GPS and LETS integration (LETS provides individual, vehicle, and violation data to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies.)
Reduced amount of redundant paperwork due to integrated activity logbook
Increased job satisfaction due to less citation generation effort
Court System Personnel
Increased citation legibility due to electronic data entry
Improved access due to immediate addition of citation to electronic database/court jurisdictions
Increased citation completion due to essential form field checks
Increased accuracy due to in-field consistency checks
Increased revenue due to the speedy issuance of single or multiple citations
Increased efficiency of court clerks due to elimination of data re-entry processes
Elimination of backlogged tickets
Highway Safety
Thorough enforcement due to streamlined citation process and informative citation analytics
Increased officer patrol time due to efficient citation process
Increased meaning for warning tickets due to reviewability in database
Identification of serial citation recipients due to immediate availability of electronic citations
Research
Optimized enforcement efforts due to citation data analytics
Access to defendant demographic data (e.g., background information, types of citations issued, etc.)
Access to citation location data due to GPS integration
I Want eCite
Alabama Agencies
eCite is free of charge to Alabama law enforcement agencies.
New users must complete initial forms that include providing the municipal court information and municipal adopting codes. This information is necessary to customize the software before you can begin using it. User accounts will be set up for agency officers.
Training manuals are available upon request: email care@cs.ua.edu
Inquiries
eCite can be adapted for any state or municipality. If you are interested in implementing eCite, another CAPS product, or working with CAPS on a custom solution, we want to hear from you!
Alabama Communications and Operations Portal, the unique information system for law enforcement information within Alabama. AlaCOP is the umbrella system for a host of information and security systems, including the Active Directory Authentication and Processing Tool (ADAPT), and the Law Enforcement Tactical System (LETS). These systems provide access for all law enforcement officers in Alabama to common information needed to conduct police business, and provide secure logon and user administration on a statewide basis – for all police agencies in the state. This work is in support of the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center, which is a state leader for the promulgation of police technology along with the close collaboration of CAPS.
History
In the summer of 2006, the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (ACJIC) unveiled the Alabama Communications and Operations Portal (AlaCOP), the state’s official criminal justice information web portal for authorized law enforcement and criminal justice officers within Alabama. AlaCOP was developed by CAPS under a contract funded by a FY 2004 grant provided by the Alabama Department of Homeland Security, through the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Security and User Privileges
Security and authentication within AlaCOP is provided by the Active Directory Authentication and Processing Tool (ADAPT). All users must be authenticated by ADAPT to determine their privileges and the access that they may have to the various AlaCOP functions. ADAPT uses a specialized database called the Centralized Agency Management System (CAMS), which keeps track of the privileges of every AlaCOP user. Developed by the CAPS system development team, ADAPT and CAMS are unique in their ability to maintain both authentication security and user privileges.
General Information Capabilities
As shown in the illustration above, the AlaCOP.gov portal enables officers to view state law enforcement announcements, such as Amber Alerts, felony fugitives, missing persons, training announcements, state law enforcement news, homeland security news, plus a wide variety of relevant documents and links. The officers may also select options to design and personalize their AlaCOP home page so that it is customized to exactly what they want to see and where they want to see it (e.g., the page may be modified to be two columns rather than three, and several of the panels are optional).
LETS Access
AlaCOP also provides law enforcement access to the Law Enforcement Tactical System (LETS), which was first developed by CAPS as a stand-alone system and announced in June, 2002. This innovative product revolutionized the way that information is shared among the state’s criminal justice agencies. LETS pulls together millions of records, titles, registrations and even photographs to assist the state’s law enforcement officers and agencies. State agencies integrating information into LETS include ACJIC, the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts, the Alabama Department of Corrections, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the Alabama Department of Public Safety.
The display below demonstrates the LETS output generated by a blanket name search.
Once the individual of interest is identified, a follow up query can provide details on all items in the accessed databases for the individual selected, as shown below.
Through the AlaCOP portal, LETS provides officers with person- and vehicle-based search that surveys state court and other databases, (such as the state’s sex offender registry). One unique feature is its ability to set alerts so that law enforcement officers can be updated if there are any changes in the data on particular suspects.
AlaCOP Message Systems
AlaCOP users have access to two message systems. The first is a standard e-mail address that is supported within AlaCOP. The second is a secure “Message Center” for officers to communicate with each other separate from the vulnerabilities of e-mail. The Message Center feature includes the officer’s ability to create closed groups (such as investigators working on a particular case) and open groups for information sharing on more general events, such as the recent Alabama church arsons. Only the moderator can add someone to a closed group, but anyone who wants to can join an open group. Any member of AlaCOP can become a moderator and set up a group.
Web Services
LETS data sources are transformed into Web services and are searchable by any officer accessing the secure portal. ACJIC information systems process more than 15 million transactions per month, and they are accessed by more than 15,000 sworn officers in over 900 criminal justice entities within Alabama and across our nation. ACJIC is connected nationally to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, as well as to all 50 states via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (Nlets). The ACJIC 24-hour Command Center monitors the network and all of their systems, and a toll free hotline ensures that officers will always be able to reach the help desk staff.
Social network graphs have been found to be an extremely effective tool in the identification of potential perpetrators of criminal activity. These graphs can grow extremely large, as illustrated by an example within this paper that contained over 4.9 million nodes and over 211 million edges. Obviously some reduction of these graphs is essential to their being useful. Further, considerable “noise” (false positive relationships) are generated when the graphs are totally comprehensive. This research transformed the original social network into a relational context-oriented edge-dual graph. This was done by evaluating the quality of the connectivity for each edge to obtain a metric to this effect for each edge. By retaining only the strongest edges the overall graph becomes more reliable and more useful in practice.
This paper presents the first attempt to integrate four distinct approaches to solving crimes, all of which have proven their value when applied independently, namely: (1) geographic assessment, (2) social networking, (3) crime pattern analysis, and (4) physical description match. The system that integrates these four search techniques, called PerpSearch, takes a description of the crime, including its locations and all other known aspects (e.g., physical characteristics of suspects, vehicles, etc.), and runs it all through the PerpSearch engine components, where they are combined to produce a score for each potential suspect. By using past data on crimes prior to solution and comparing the results against the eventual known perpetrators, the system can be fine tuned and validated. A prototype has been implemented using current Alabama criminal and demographic databases.
This research had the goal of improving the classification of offenders into their different levels of risk in order to improve the decision-making process with regard to diversion programs (i.e., alternatives to incarceration). The system is based on an automated assessment of the likelihood of recidivism based on nine weighted attributes. The system can easily be tested by running it on past historical data and then comparing the results with the observation of more recent outcomes. This was pilot tested using data from Madison County, Alabama.
CARE IMPACT analyses were performed to compare 13 dry counties with 13 wet counties over their various crash characteristics for a recent five-year (2003-2007) time period. The results fall into two logical categories: those that compare the demographics of the counties and those that compare the crash characteristics with regard to alcohol. A few of the nearly 200 attribute comparisons are presented in this report in order to guide the future direction of the research project.
As part of their youth-alcohol program, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs requested a special study to focus on the development of Youth-DUI countermeasures. This report is in three sections. The first is a summary of recommended countermeasures in prioritized order based upon estimated cost-benefit. The recommendations are based upon the detailed analysis performed for Alabama and reviews of potential countermeasures given in the literature. The second and third sections of this report provide the detailed data analysis that was originally performed for the State of Alabama for CY (calendar year) 2003. These have been updated using CY 2007 data.
This report, and the Op Ed that follows it, is in response to a number of prominent college presidents who have recently come out in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18 years. The goal of the report is to project how many additional fatalities will be caused in Alabama should the law be change in Alabama.
