TORONTO (djc) – Staff Sgt. Larry Brien is Toronto’s cybercop, and his hot technology project – called eCOPS – is designed to wire the police force for some remarkable crime fighting.
But before you get visions of an armour-clad, weapon-toting criminal buster, know that with his short haircut and red moustache, he looks more like a gumshoe plainclothes policeman than a futuristic superhero.
However, eCOPS will certainly put new tools into the hands of Toronto crime fighters. The project’s key weapons: police efficiency, and better, faster access to information.
Short for Enterprise Case and Occurrence Processing System, eCOPS is a $16-million project designed to save time in collecting data relating to police work, and making it accessible to Toronto police.
Until eCOPS came along, the police force had been collecting crime fighting data in various disconnected police databases for about 15 years.
In the late 1980s, the force developed a system called Computerized Occurrence Processing System (COPS), used to catalog criminal incidents.
With COPS, when a case is investigated and an arrest is made, the data is entered into the Criminal Information Processing System (CIPS). This database contains information pertaining to all police cases, including those in the court system.
Three other Toronto Police systems contain fingerprints, photos, contacts with suspects, as well as national police information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
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Cyber-cop Staff Sgt. Larry Brien is responsible for the implementation of eCops. – Photo: djc Features |
Under the old system before eCOPS, the analysis for crime was an arduous process. However, eCOPS will make predictive analysis possible in minutes or hours, making crime analysis a highly effective tool.
Geo-coder technology has also been refreshed in the eCOPS rollout. It allows personnel to map crime hot spots. For example, if a particular type of crime is occurring in a park, an investigating officer can look at areas in the park and map past incidents – within metres – to see when and where crimes occur. This can lead to better policing of troublesome areas.
“Today, there is a laborious process to geo-code the information. With eCOPS, that will be automatic, so map generation will be very simple,” Brien says.
By March 2002, 70 per cent of the technology in eCOPS had been tested with the eCOPS Unified Search function. This is key to better data retrieval and was first deployed for testing to 51 Division, located in the Toronto neighbourhood of Regent Park. This spring, the system was also deployed to all police stations in Toronto and made available to front line officers.
The other objective of eCOPS is to reduce the cost of data handling. In the past, information came from a variety of sources, such as from paper reports and the telephone. Any given record could take from 24 to 48 hours just to get filed.
But with eCOPS, the data is entered by officers directly into the system, which will prevent the need to share files with the force’s various computer systems.
Brien says the elimination of clerical jobs will produce approximately $4 million in savings annually, and employees in those jobs have been relocated to other parts of the force. Brien calculates that the project will pay for itself within four years.
By 2003, eCOPS will also be accessible through wireless mobile units. The first part of that project happened this March. Antennas were placed in police division parking lots, which give the force’s 335 patrol cars access to a high-speed wireless network when they get within 300 metres of the lots. This will enhance the existing wireless network that the Toronto Police Service currently uses.
Though the police force will be able to access data and file reports, any residual data that isn’t uploaded will be filed only when the car reaches the parking lot network because of limited bandwidth. There are some other limitations, like photo access since wireless connection speeds are still too slow.
In the future, Brien expects to extend this functionality to allow access to handheld computers for bicycle and mounted units, as well as officers on foot, but that won’t happen until wireless access is more robust. “We want to be on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge,” he says.
