Law Enforcement – Page 2 – The Center for Advanced Public Safety

eCite

March 19th, 2014
in

About

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It was developed as a process-level solution to the outdated and time-consuming paper citation form used by law enforcement and the court system.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

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.

eCite technical support desk:
205-348-9672 | alea-caps.support@ua.edu

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!

Training Manuals

Available upon request to eCite users. To request a manual, please email care@cs.ua.edu.

AlaCOP

March 3rd, 2014
in

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). 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.

A Relation Context Oriented Approach to Identify Strong Ties in Social Networks

October 1st, 2009
in

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.

PerpSearch: An Integrated Crime Detection System

June 8th, 2009
in

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.

IRAS: An Inmates’ Risk Assessment System

June 1st, 2009
in

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.

Analysis of the Wet vs. Dry Counties within Alabama

January 31st, 2009
in

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.

A Review of Youth-Alcohol Traffic Crashes in Alabama During CY 2007

January 15th, 2009
in

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.

Alcohol Age Crash Analysis – Projections of the Effect of Lowering the Legal Drinking Age in Alabama

August 16th, 2008
in

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.

A Host Architecture for Automobile License Plate Recognition

May 1st, 2008
in

The objective of this paper was to present an architecture that supports data transmission and data sharing among applications related to commodity tag recognition systems. These systems are used extensively in Great Britain and other countries to recognize automobile license plates and to notify security officials of suspicious activity or trafficking by known suspects. This architecture was tested in a successful pilot project.

Using an Edge-dual Graph and k-connectivity to Identify Strong Connections in Social Networks

March 1st, 2008
in

The goal of this paper is to use edge-dual graph transformation techniques to improve the accuracy of social network analysis (SNA). SNA is used in law enforcement to determine if relationships exist among potential suspects, and to identify just what those relationships might be. Relationships can be family, friends, past associates, cell mates and even prison enemies. The paper presented results that showed that this transformation had a very high potential for increasing the accuracy of relationship search routines.

Discipline: Law Enforcement